Spinnaker Support is to offer Salesforce Application Management and consulting services. The announcement comes nearly two years after its rival Rimini Street launched similar services around Salesforce. Matt Stava, CEO at Spinnaker Support commented: “Today’s Salesforce services market has a notable gap in post-implementation support for platform efficiency, productivity, and growth. Many Salesforce customers struggle to find a partner with extensive CRM services experience, a deep understanding of how CRM best fits into their enterprise-wide strategic roadmap, and an established global infrastructure, with a base of highly satisfied and loyal customers.
“Our blend of tailored, affordable application management services and consulting capabilities will help fill this gap and provide customers with a single partner that can meet more of their critical needs.”
The new Spinnaker Support consists of three service packages:
- Admin and Assistance: Access to an adminstrator and architect to provide additional resources or backfill for routine tasks. They will also advise on implementing new Salesforce functions and features.
- Manage and Develop: A dedicated team that provides additional resources for short term projects to build out the Salesforce solution for an organisation.
- Agile Team Delivery: Embeds a complete team to delivery projects using agile methodologies. The team can help to rapidly deploy Salesforce solutions across the organisation. It will also act as a long-term partner and strategic adviser.
With each service it will provide a relevant mix of certified Salesforce administrators, developers and architects. The services will cover Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Analytics Cloud, Platform Cloud, Community Cloud and AppExchange. It is unclear what the latter entails though it may be that Spinnaker Support will help with the deployment of third party applications.
Beyond Salesforce?
Chad Stewart, Vice President of Global SaaS Support Services at Spinnaker Support will head up the new team and is also responsible for all SaaS business development. This infers that Spinnaker may offer services for other applications in time, not just Salesforce. Stewart joined Spinnaker in February. He started his career at Accenture and was previously a solution principal at Slalom Consulting, a Salesforce platinum partner. Spinnaker has yet to appear on the AppExchange as a consultancy firm. It is unclear what level of Salesforce partner Spinnaker Support is at the moment.
Stewart stated: “Salesforce customers need a long-term partner that will consistently deliver value across their Salesforce ecosystem while controlling costs. Spinnaker Support is that partner. Our expanding team of Salesforce experts can now support six different Salesforce products, and we will continue to rapidly grow the practice. Whether Salesforce customers need basic administration and routine task handling or require agile development and deployment methodology for complex environments, we can engage at the level they need and deliver the services their business demands.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
It is surprising that it has taken so long for Spinnaker Support to launch this service. More of its customers are turning to Salesforce for their CRM. It is now playing catchup to Rimini Street and others. It will be interesting to see whether the company invests further. Will it acquire a boutique Salesforce practice to accelerate the growth of the business?
The other element is that Stewart may head up more than just a Salesforce SaaS unit. There are several possibilities including ServiceNow and others. The challenge for Stewart is that he needs to prove that Spinnaker Support can deliver on these service packages.
