A recently introduced practice around the media and entertainment industry and growth in Canada have contributed to 20-plus percent growth in sales year over year expected by Salesforce partner Silverline, co-founder and CEO Gireesh Sonnad told CRN in an interview.
The growth comes as a result of New York-based Silverline’s acquisition of Canada-based Shift CRM, Sonnad said. And while he doesn’t predict more acquisitions in the near future, growth in Silverline’s future will come from diving deeper into Salesforce’s product portfolio, including recent acquisition Slack.
“At 500-plus people, we’re probably the largest pure play Salesforce practice that exists, or very close, which we’re proud of,” Sonnad said. “And certainly the biggest one that focuses entirely on an industry model. And so we’re going to continue to push on that as hard as we can. And Salesforce is lining straight up with that. Everything that they’re doing now is in the industry vein as well. And so I think that’s the best growth area for us.”
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Sonnad hopes to hear more from Salesforce on integration with Slack – a collaboration application that rivals Microsoft’s Teams app – as well as its Customer 360 customer relationship management (CRM) platform during the San Francisco-based vendor’s Dreamforce conference, happening in person and streaming online Sept. 20 to Sept. 22.
Looking forward, Sonnad said that if Salesforce decides to work with distributors and indirect partners – such as TD Synnex, Pax8 and Ingram Micro – that could help the vendor grow its partner ecosystem.
Ongoing Salesforce investments in training engineers and workers in Salesforce’s product portfolio – which includes Slack, data analytics software provider Tableau and integration platform provider MuleSoft – is another help to partners such as Silverline, Sonnad said. He’s had success filling open positions by hiring people from health care and other industries Silverline serves as opposed to hiring people from other partner businesses and IT companies.
“The single hardest thing we do is to bring great people on board to serve as our clients,” he said. “And so the more that Salesforce can use some of the weight and the resources that they have to make training easier and better and faster. Or to push even farther into things like university programs – so on and so forth — so that most people come out of the gate understanding who we are that the Salesforce ecosystem is a great place to be, (that) would be super welcome.”
He continued: “In fairness, they’re doing a very good job of it and probably a better job than they ever have been. It’s just an enormous mountain to climb. It’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands of certified consultants that is the gap over the next five years.”
Here’s what else Sonnad had to say to CRN.
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Wade Tyler Millward is an associate editor covering cloud computing and the channel partner programs of Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, Salesforce, Citrix and other cloud vendors. He can be reached at [email protected].
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