Fast-Growing Salesforce Demand in Germany Drives Increasing Consolidation Among Service Providers

“More enterprises are adopting Salesforce software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions and turning to the ecosystem for help in implementing them.”

The 2021 ISG Provider Lens™ Salesforce Ecosystem Partners report for Germany finds fast-growing adoption of Salesforce products is increasing the need among enterprises for outside support to implement solutions. The rising demand for resources with Salesforce implementation experience has led to big technology players acquiring smaller service and solution providers, with Salesforce itself making two of the recent takeovers. Last year, in the U.S., it announced the acquisitions of software vendor Vlocity and implementation service provider Acumen Solutions.

The consolidation trend in the German market, though less pronounced than in the U.S., has seen global system integrators acquire medium-sized vendors in the past year, and the pace is expected to keep increasing, ISG says.

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“The German market for Salesforce implementation services has heated up in the year since our last report,” said Andrea Spiegelhoff, EMEA partner for ISG in Germany. “More enterprises are adopting Salesforce software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions and turning to the ecosystem for help in implementing them.”

All providers of Salesforce support, from global system integrators to boutique vendors, still need a strong network of independent software vendors to meet the specialized requirements of specific industries and enterprises, the report says. Salesforce products have a highly standardized range of features, so providers are forming partnerships to avoid having to develop solutions for individual clients on their own.

For large-enterprise implementations of Salesforce products, the most common development approach is now the Hybrid Agile model, which combines Agile and phase-oriented approaches, ISG says. Most service providers offer this approach. Pure Agile methodologies are still suitable but are applied primarily for midsize clients with lower integration requirements and no need for a global rollout.

Meanwhile, the dominant tool for Salesforce integration is Mulesoft, the report says. Service providers need significant capabilities in this area, and many global system integrators have large, dedicated Mulesoft practices for integration activities around Salesforce.

This year’s Salesforce Ecosystem Partners report distinguishes between the requirements of large, globally operating companies and that of medium-sized enterprises, with most providers best suited to one category. The report consists of two quadrants concerning providers meeting the needs of large companies and three for partners serving midsize firms.

The 2021 ISG Provider Lens™ Salesforce Ecosystem Partners report for Germany evaluates the capabilities of 36 providers across five quadrants: Implementation and Integration Services for Large Enterprises, Implementation Services for Core Clouds – Midmarket, Implementation Services for Marketing Cloud – Midmarket, Managed Application Services for Large Enterprises, and Managed Application Services for Midmarket.

The report names BearingPoint, Deutsche Telekom (MMS), ec4u, Factory42, Persistent Systems and Salesfive as Leaders in three quadrants each. It names Accenture, Capgemini, Cognizant, Infosys, Magnet360, TCS and Wipro as Leaders in two quadrants each and Deloitte, HCL and PwC as Leaders in one quadrant each.

In addition, Aquilliance and DIA are named as Rising Stars—companies with a “promising portfolio” and “high future potential” by ISG’s definition—in one quadrant each.