ISG Provider Lens report sees many U.S. companies lacking the expertise or capacity to implement and consolidate Salesforce products

U.S. enterprises are looking for service providers to help them keep up with frequent updates of Salesforce products, according to a new report published by Information Services Group (ISG), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

The 2020 ISG Provider Lens™ Salesforce Ecosystem Report for the U.S. finds many U.S. enterprises seeking service providers to assist them with implementation and integration of Salesforce applications because they don’t have sufficient in-house expertise or capacity.

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The complexity of adding or updating Salesforce products tends to increase with the size of the enterprise customer, said Jan Erik Aase, director and global leader, ISG Provider Lens Research. “More complexity is added when global system design and rollout are required,” he said. “In most cases, large U.S. enterprise customers prefer Salesforce-related providers with strong integration capabilities on a global scale.”

In many cases, U.S. enterprises need to consolidate multiple isolated Salesforce instances that have been growing over the years, often driven by businesses themselves without the involvement of their IT divisions, the report says.

The report also suggests providers offering Salesforce-related services also need to offer capabilities for other common software packages. Instead of the pure agile approaches used in most early Salesforce projects, many enterprise customers now prefer implementations that are a combination of agile elements during the implementation stage and more phase-oriented elements for strategy, design and rollout. This is often called a hybrid agile approach.

A pure agile approach is still suitable for small and mid-size companies with a limited global presence and in cases where an implementation is needed for subsidiaries of a global company that have a limited scope, the report adds. In these cases, mid-size service providers that focus on Salesforce only and on agile implementations—often called boutique providers—have a large share of the market.

The report also sees a trend toward ongoing consolidation in the Salesforce service provider market. In recent years, large system integrators in the U.S. have been acquiring boutique providers. Many system integrators have been buying smaller providers to expand their own workforces in response to an increasing demand for a myriad of services.

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For all providers, a strong network of partnerships with independent software vendors (ISVs) within the Salesforce ecosystem is important, the report says. Many providers are seeing a growing demand for industry-specific requirements or support for specific functions that go beyond the standard scope of Salesforce products. Partnerships with ISVs can help providers cover these additional customer requirements.

The 2020 ISG Provider Lens Salesforce Ecosystem Report for the U.S. evaluates the capabilities of 36 providers across four quadrants: Implementation and Integration Services, Implementation Services for Core Clouds, Implementation Services for Marketing Cloud and Managed Application Services.

The report names Magnet360 as a leader in three quadrants and Accenture, Acumen Solutions, Appirio, Bluewolf, Capgemini, Cognizant, Infosys, NTT DATA, Slalom and TCS all as leaders in two. DEG, Deloitte, HCL, Persistent Systems, PwC and Traction on Demand are named leaders in one quadrant.

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