It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere, Time for a Shot of Tquila, Salesforce and Accenture

For months now we have been talking to everyone who will listen about the arrival of the “As-a-Service Economy” and how it is changing the IT and Business Services market.   In particular how there are 8 Ideals of this new market, which service providers are striving to deliver for their enterprise clients.   Critical to this delivery is the availability of talent experienced with these new platforms and concepts such as Design Thinking, Intelligent Automation, Intelligent Data, Intelligent Engagement and generally being Brokers of Capability.  

Services Providers solutioning around sought after platforms such as Salesforce, Workday and Servicenow simply can’t seem to train up their own cadre of people fast enough to fill the market demand for this new talent and with so many new and credible start-ups being available, its no wonder that consulting acquisitions are being pursued.

Accenture’s announcement that they are acquiring 5 year old Tquila, a consulting and implementation provider on Salesforce in just part of what we expect to be a deluge of such announcements in 2015.  Tquila gives Accenture an additional 100+ Salesforce consultants in Europe to add to their internally developed resources within the Emerging Technologies unit of the Technology Growth Platform.  These additional resources will also allow Accenture to provide greater coordinated support to global clients deploying Salesforce which is a competitive advantage today.

The power of these new consulting service providers was evident in our about to be released HfS Blueprint on Workday Services where 3 of our Winner’s Circle members and 3 of our High Performers were specialized Workday consultants.   We expect to see the same mix of start-ups and established service providers leading the way as we launch the research for our Blueprint on Salesforce Services this month.

It’s never easy to acquire and retain specialized consulting resources but with demand for people skilled in the new As-a-Service platforms outstripping the availability in the established service providers it’s time to throw back a shot and take the plunge into M&A today.