International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM), has made moves to support a consulting business with the aim of helping clients of Salesforce.com Inc., to reach a deal to buy a specialist in the field called BlueWolf Group LLC.
No financial terms were disclosed by the companies involved, but reports indicated that IBM is going to pay slightly over the $200 million mark. IBM’s move is not the first in the field, with one of its rivals, Accenture PLC, buying Cloud Sherpas, a company that also provided consulting service which was related to both Salesforce and Google services.
The San Francisco-based firm, Salesforce, was a driving force in offering software as an online service rather than selling the programs installed on customers own computers. The company then expanded its services from automating standard tasks of sales representatives to a whole list of additional offerings known as the customer relationship management in the field. The company was founded back in 1990.
Ever since then, many companies have been started with the aim of helping companies to customize Salesforce services and integrate them with other corporate systems. This is the same way that companies also built consulting practice around business software from firms like SAP DE.
BlueWolf’s CEO, Eric Berridge, whose company was founded back in 2000 and is based New York, says the firm had been offering Salesforce related service since 2002. With an employee capacity of 500 and offices in North America, United Kingdom, France and Australia, the company seems like a good investment.
They are poised to join the IBM Interactive Experience, a division of the computing giant’s global services. The branch works with offerings from Salesforce, SAP and others. IBM said that they had completed 10 cloud-related acquisitions, with the BlueWolf deal included.
The global leader of the IBM unit, Paul Papas, said the combination of BlueWolf’s expertise with IBM services and activities such as that of Apple Inc., customers would only stand to benefit from the deal. “They now have the access to the full capabilities that IBM has to offer,” he said.
Salesforce.com’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said he was proud and delighted by Mr. Berridge’s efforts at Blue Wolf. He said Mr. Berridge had built BlueWolf from a start-up into a leader it is now in the Salesforce services. “The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016 and is subject to standard regulatory reviews,” the companies said.
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