Accenture Buying Cloud Sherpas Unveils the Value of As-A-Service Talent

Accenture has added considerable strength to its already-strong position in Salesforce services with the addition of Cloud Sherpas, coming on the back of previous Salesforce services acquisitions of Tquila and ClientHouse GmbH. In addition, there are added capabilities in ServiceNow and Google, but the lion’s share of the Cloud Sherpas acquisition is in the Salesforce implementation domain, where we see the most medium-term growth opportunity for As-a-Service providers in the customer centricity solutions arena.

HfS views the success of this acquisition as tied to Accenture’s ability to integrate Cloud Sherpas’ capabilities across operations, consulting and systems integration and to use the core training and certification methodologies of Cloud Sherpas to transform Accenture’s own ability to grow Salesforce consulting, implementation and management talent.

We believe this move not only consolidates Accenture’s already-strong position in Salesforce services, but also keeps competitors, namely Deloitte, Capgemini and IBM, from muscling into the space at a critical time.