We recently talked with Wipro regarding its 4C acquisition. Wipro accelerated the development of its Salesforce practice with the Appirio acquisition in November 2016. Indianapolis-headquartered Appirio was an essential move for Wipro, paying $500m for the firm, its second-largest acquisition ever. As well as a Salesforce business, Appirio brought in a Google practice, crowdsourcing vendor Topcoder, and a Workday practice. At the time of its acquisition, Appirio had ~1,250 employees, mostly based in the U.S., with some based in offices in London, Dublin, and Tokyo.

Wipro integrated Appirio with its Salesforce practice (~600 personnel at the time of the merger) and set up development centers in Porto, Manilla, and Guadalajara. In parallel, Wipro rolled out its commercial deployment in Sao Paulo, Munich, Paris, and Melbourne.

Wipro's subsequent divestment in 2019 of its Workday and Cornerstone practices (350 employees) to major client Alight Solutions meant that Appirio became a purely Salesforce-focused practice.

Wipro has ambitious revenue plans for its Salesforce business, aiming to grow the practice through a combination of organic investment and acquisitions to become a $1bn practice within five years. Salesforce, which is growing by 25%-30% every year, drives the service ecosystem and Wipro, with its dual onshore/offshore background, is well-positioned to benefit from this growth.

4C Brings Presence in Europe and Specialized Capabilities

4C is headquartered in Brussels and generated revenues of €32m in 2019. Founded in 1997, the company initially provided consulting and analytics services, expanding quickly to CRM.

In 2012, 4C made the decision to focus its CRM services activities solely around Salesforce, sacrificing half of its revenues at the time. This bold move was successful, and Salesforce Ventures-backed 4C became a Platinum partner. Industry consulting, Salesforce, and analytics remain the foundation capabilities of 4C, which has its own AI (TellMi) for unstructured data ingestion and analysis.

In recent years, 4C has made several small-scale acquisitions, expanding its presence in Europe to include the U.K. (CloudSocius, 2016), France (Neoxia JV, 2016), and Denmark & Norway (3C Consult, 2019). As well as Benelux, 4C significantly expands Appirio’s onshore presence in these countries, U.K, France, Denmark, Norway, also Dubai, UAE.

In terms of offerings, 4C has pivoted its capabilities from its former core Multi-Cloud capabilities to Quote To Cash, contract lifecycle management (CLM), and Field Service Lightning (FSL). In total, we estimate that nearly 20% of 4C's employees are working in QTC/CLM and FSL across verticals. A client reference for CPQ is a large U.K. technology firm. 4C has also been scaling up its Marketing Cloud capabilities, including Datorama. The pandemic helps drive increased activity in Marketing Cloud as Salesforce clients look to intensify their communications with their customers.

The CPQ, FSL, and Marketing Cloud capabilities brought in by 4C are a significant boost to Wipro's global Salesforce capabilities; historically, these have been less of a focus for Appirio. 4C also has Einstein analytics capabilities.

4C is keen for its Salesforce specialists to work across clouds and encourage them to have multiple certifications, with Sales, Service, and Community Clouds as core certifications. To date, its 365 or so employees have gained over 1k certifications.

With Appirio and now 4C, Wipro has around 2,500 Salesforce specialists globally across the Americas, EMEA, Asia, and Australia, with approximately 7,400 certifications between them, and has gained experience from working on over 5,000 projects. And Wipro also has access to the 200,000 or so personnel with Salesforce capabilities in the Topcoder community.

Introducing Appirio Purvue to 4C

Wipro's short-term priorities, unsurprisingly, are focused on integrating 4C with Appirio and driving commercial synergies.

One area of potential synergies center on Appirio Purvue, a significant current development at Appirio. Appirio has built Purvue as a tool to support its Close the Experience Gap offering. Purvue is a dashboard and toolset for measuring and benchmarking the capability maturity and pain points within a client's business processes (e.g. within marketing, lead management, opportunity management, etc.) and the NPV/IRR of Salesforce projects. Appirio has developed a version of Purvue, which uses Salesforce Health Cloud to help organizations track their readiness for reopening offices in an ongoing COVID-19 environment.

We believe that Appirio will be introducing 4C to Purvue so that 4C consultants can use the tool to drive more data-oriented consulting engagements.

And expect to hear more about Purvue from Appirio over the next year; it has the potential to be a useful sales aid for Salesforce projects.