In November 2020, Atos unveiled its strategy for OneCloud, which focuses on key partnerships with the hyperscalers, and also includes three ISVs: SAP, ServiceNow, and Salesforce. We recently talked to Atos' Salesforce practice to discuss its growth plans and recent acquisitions.

Atos has been a long-standing SAP partner and recently reignited its Salesforce practice, making two acquisitions in Q4 2020 with Eagle Creek Software Services and Edifixio, both Salesforce specialists. Together, they bring around 600 Salesforce consultants, mostly based in the U.S. and France.

Eagle Creek brings specialization in the U.S. around Commerce Cloud, Field Services & Vlocity

Eagle Creek has its headquarters in Minneapolis, MN. The company has around 250 employees and serves clients in the telecoms, manufacturing, financial services, health & life science, and public sectors.

Eagle Creek initially provided Siebel Systems services, turning to Salesforce in 2016 when Salesforce acquired Demandware (now Commerce Cloud). The company has maintained its Commerce Cloud specialization, expanding its capabilities to .NET and Java development capabilities to enhance the UI of Commerce Cloud.

In parallel, the company developed capabilities around Field Services Lightning. Eagle Creek believes that the potential for field services automation is untapped. With Salesforce further investing in its field service product portfolio with the 2019 acquisitions of Click Software (labor scheduling), and MapAnything (driving directions on a mobile), Eagle Creek sees a preference by clients for Salesforce products over those of GE/ServiceMax or Oracle. In 2017, Eagle Creek became a Vlocity partner in addressing utilities and CSPs, becoming one of the top three service partners in North America.

Eagle Creek has an onshore-only delivery approach, with its technology centers located in North and South Dakota, close to its Minneapolis headquarters. These centers are used for training as well as delivery. Eagle Creek also benefits from the loyalty of its employees in the Dakotas, with attrition at ~5%.

Edifixio: Sales, Marketing, Community & SAP integration

French company Edifixio brings a different set of capabilities to Atos. Edifixio has a background in application migration to the cloud. The company also built B2B portals and marketplaces, integrating them with back-end systems (e.g., SAP). Ten years ago, the company expanded to Salesforce services, initially focusing on CRM/Sales Cloud.

Currently, Edifixio has ~80 Salesforce consultants in Paris and Grenoble and ~300 certifications. It has mostly capabilities around Sales and Marketing, along with Community Cloud and Heroku (for mobile enablement). The company is active on the application and data integration side and has developed several related accelerators and IP.

Edifxio provides an AWS-hosted SAP integration product as a managed service. Another IP is an AppExchange data quality tool that Edifixio developed for detecting data duplicates and improving its clients' data quality. Finally, Edifixio brings a DevOps IP, complementing Salesforce DX.

Atos: bold growth ambitions & portfolio verticalization

An immediate priority for Atos is consolidating its portfolio of services and accelerators and making these consistent across geographies. The company wants to push its application and data integration capabilities and make Salesforce's products interoperable, targeting Commerce and Field Services integration. Synergies with the rest of Atos in integration and strategy and business process consulting will help here.

In the mid-term, Atos has bold growth ambitions. With Edifixio and Eagle Creek, the company has 600 consultants in its Salesforce practice, and is targeting 1,500 consultants within two years. To fuel this growth, Atos is retraining internally as much as possible. M&A activity is also highly likely. The company just finalized, in February 2021, the acquisition of Profit4SF. The Utrecht, Netherlands-based Profit4SF is small firm, with 30 employees. More importantly, it brings precious Marketing Cloud capabilities.

Atos also intends to verticalize its service portfolio. An immediate priority is Vlocity (now Salesforce Industries) around telecoms, media, and utilities. Unsurprisingly, given its client base, Atos is also targeting the manufacturing sector, mostly in the U.S., Germany, and France.

We think that Atos' portfolio verticalization is an effective approach, helping Salesforce in its effort. While Salesforce has launched several industry clouds in the past years, it still needs to rely on its service partners to complement its horizontal capabilities. Two numbers indicate the priorities of Salesforce: it will spend $27.7bn on acquiring Slack, while it spent $1.33bn for Vlocity!