Wipro has beaten others like Cognizant, Infosys and HCL to emerge as the World’s second best Salesforce.com deployment partner, according to a study conducted by Forrester Research.
In a study of the World’s top 11 salesforce.com partners, Wipro was beaten to the first place only by its much bigger global competitor Accenture.
Along with the above two, Infosys was the only firm to be considered a ‘leader’ in salesforce implementation by the survey, which also took into account the response given by the firms’ customers.
The survey will come as a minor relief for the Indian IT majors which have been accused of having missed the bus on the impending Cloud revolution in the market.
Salesforce.com is the service provider widely credited with starting off the Cloud revolution with its customer relationship management product. Salesforce.com has, over the years, moved out of its customer relationship software segment and opened up its base platform to other software makers to deploy their products.
Today, salesforce.com is being used to deploy solutions such as those for managing employees etc.. It is also frequently ‘patched on’ to traditional inventory management software such as SAP and Oracle to enable customers to directly make orders and purchases.
The survey found that Indian players like Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant and HCL could not beat the global players in terms of having ready talent available all across the World to work on local projects, but otherwise, they were comparable in performance.
In terms of strategy for the cloud, for example, it was Wipro which scored the highest with 4 out of 5 stars, followed by Accenture with 3.93 points. Infosys and Cognizant took the number 3 and 4 spots out of the 11 firms ranked according to their strategic clarity towards this emerging market. They also did well on the ‘current offering’ section — which measured how good their practice actually is, rather than what investment they were making for the future; but were beaten by Accenture here.
Forrester pointed out that while the Global players like IBM and Accenture have size and a global presence on their side, it was the Indians who seemed to be innovating in terms of creating tools and prebuilt platforms in the cloud arena.
“Global System Integrators offer the most geographically distributed resource pool and broadest scope of services, ranging from advisory services to process design to technical implementation, configuration, and integration. Additionally, because they have such strong practices across other technology categories, they are well suited toward salesforce.com projects that are part of larger, more complex initiatives,” the report noted, adding:
“India-based services firms are highly focused on technical development and IP creation. They offer a variety of solutions for salesforce.com that speed deployment or prebuild common integrations or interfaces… many of these firms also invest substantially in tool kits and platforms or other productized services that can be used to accelerate deployments in key pain point areas (such as integration or testing).
“Cognizant and Wipro are also moving toward a broker model where they can be the central point of contact for firms dealing with the complexity of multiple SaaS integrations,” Forrester pointed out.
