Mumbai: Salesforce is betting big on its partner ecosystem in India. The cloud services provider, which is excited about the growth prospects in the CRM business in the country, is making a substantial amount of investments in the entire APAC region to compete with its competitors such as Oracle and Microsoft.
In an exclusive interaction with Channel Times, Arun Balasubramanian, Area Vice President, Commercial Sales, India, explained company’s channel engagement in India. “Partners are absolutely key to our success and we are investing a lot in our partner ecosystem. We are heavily focusing on partner enablement to ensure long lasting relations with our customers”, said Balasubramanian.
In India, Salesforce has three partner engagement models. The company works with Global partners, domestic partners having global presence and the large system integrators. The company currently works with around 40 large SIs spread across West, North and South region. Salesforce majorly focuses on verticals such as E Commerce, Non banking financial services companies, Manufacturing and Pharmaceutics in the country.
“We work with different sets of partners and we have the engagement model that encourages them to engage with enterprises, commercial and SMBs, depending upon where does the model fits for them. We have different partners who come in and play in this space”, said Balasubramanian.
Also Read: Salesforce Strengthens Channel Partners with Lightening, Einstein
Salesforce, recently announced the launch of Lightning Partner Community – a solution for companies to accelerate sales from their channel partners. The Lightning Partner Community extends the CRM and AI tools a business is using to its resellers, franchises, and channel teams. The company in its annual Dreamforce conference held in October said that channel partners would continue to be an integral part of the company’s growth that saw revenues rise from USD 4 billion over three years ago to USD 8 billion in 2016-17.
The company organized Advantage Tour 2016 in Mumbai on Wednesday to share updates of its Dreamforce 2016 event. The company claimed that $4.2 billion would be added in GDP impact to the economy via Salesforce customers by 2020. The company also said that close to 5,00,000 jobs added to the Indian economy directly and indirectly from use of Salesforce by 2020.
Salesforce sees huge potentials in the cloud business in India. The company has set up a new Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Hyderabad as part of its expansion plans in India. This is one of Salesforce’s largest global offices outside of its San Francisco headquarters. Balasubramanian said that the company would be making investments in its more such centres in the APAC region in the coming months, however, he declined to share the figure of investment that the company would make in the region.
Salesforce has also announced collaboration with the Telangana Academy for Skill and Knowledge (TASK) to provide training to over 2,000 students and 100 faculty members over the next two years. “ This is our first step towards engagement with the government. We look forward to partner with other government bodies in the future”, said Balasubramanian.