Cognizant Technology Solutions has acquired SaaSfocus, a major Salesforce cloud consulting partner in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region with operations in Australia and India.
Cognizant's cloud project push spans Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure & Workday. SaaSfocus, founded in 2019, apparently complements those focus areas nicely. The company has completed more than 1,500 Salesforce projects across the financial services, insurance, manufacturing, and automotive industries. The company's key partners include:
Integration partners like Informatica, Jitterbit and MuleSoft
App Exchange partners like Conga, DocuSign, GeoPointe and SMS Magic; and
Industry partner Cloud Lending Solutions.
More than 350 SaaSfocus consultants will join Cognizant's Salesforce practice.
Executive Perspectives and Cloud Projects
Explaining the deal, Jayajyoti Sengupta, head of APAC at Cognizant, said:
Amit Choudhary
"This acquisition of a respected and successful Salesforce specialist underlines our commitment to helping clients in Australia and India digitally transform their businesses and reshape the way they interact with their customers. Customer relationship and service management systems are at the core of our clients' digital strategies. We look forward to welcoming the SaaSfocus team to Cognizant and combining our strengths to create new transformative digital solutions for our clients."
Added Amit Choudhary, partner at SaaSfocus:
"Cognizant's global delivery footprint, digital expertise and unique culture of innovation and empowerment made it a natural fit for SaaSfocus. Combining Cognizant's global capabilities, deep domain expertise and digital solutions with SaaSfocus's specialized Salesforce consulting competencies will help us accelerate our clients' digital transformation journeys and create global opportunities for our employees."
The deal arrives at a key time for Cognizant, which is growing -- both not as quickly as Wall Street would like. Revenues were $4.01 billion in Q2 2018 -- up 9.3 percent from Q2 2017, according to a company announcement earlier this month. But the revenue figure was about $20 million below Wall Street's expectations.
Salesforce is one of several cloud platforms fueling Cognizant's cloud project growth. Indeed, Cognizant employs "thousands of certified cloud experts who can accelerate clients' cloud journeys by drawing on our strategic partnerships with all of the major cloud providers, including Azure, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com, Workday and more," CEO Francisco D'Souza said during the August earnings call. "So we expect our digital portfolio to continue to grow at double-digit rates."
Salesforce Partner Acquisitions
M&A activity involving Salesforce partners has been very strong for several months. Among the mergers and acquisitions we’ve tracked:
Simplus in May 2018 acquired CirrusOne, a Salesforce and Oracle partner that offers consulting services for CPQ (configure, price, quote) and quote-to-cash solutions.
Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.
Amit Choudhary
