CloudSmiths CEO tells all on 2023 UK growth strategy

The Salesforce partner boss laid out his plan of action for the UK and gave his thoughts on Elliott Management's involvement in Salesforce

South Africa-based Salesforce partner CloudSmiths says it's looking to develop its skills to grow its market share in the UK.

Founded in 2014, CloudSmiths bills itself as a tech consultancy with a focus on data analytics, machine learning, cloud infrastructure and business reporting.

The group is made up of a combination of a number of Salesforce practices acquired over the years. Its most recent buy was its merger with D‍otModus.

CRN spoke with CloudSmiths co-founder and CEO Jason Timm to find out what goals he wants his company to reach in the UK market this year.

Timm took the reins of the group four years ago and since then has aimed to grow the business to more than its Salesforce partner status.

"My vision for the business was not just to be a Salesforce specialist partner, but to have broader skills in terms of delivering successful projects," he said.

"And to do so you need governance, you need project management, but you need the majority of subject matter experts, technical experts and governance to be successful. And I think holistically as a practice that's what we focused on building over the last four years."

Talking more specifically about what he wants to achieve by the end of 2023, Timm highlighted his aspirations in the UK market.

"One of the things we've been successful with is, half of our revenue comes from the UK," he said.

"Our growth into the UK has made us a Salesforce and data engineering expert partner in the UK with delivery excellence inside of Africa. And Africa's really at our roots because skills development is a huge part of what we do in a business as diverse as CloudSmiths.

"So what we want to achieve is to grow and impact the African development landscape, but to be able to deliver into the UK and Middle East with those skills.

"We started in the UK quite a few years ago. 2018 was the first time we entered the UK market, but for the customers we have, we've been operating for the past three years."

The CloudSmiths UK strategy

On how Timm plans to carry out the goals he's set for the group, he revealed a large part of his plan involves partners.

"Partnerships are primary," he said. "We're very well known by Salesforce but because of their structure in EMEA we've got lots of relationships we can leverage. But the strategy is really to be specialists.

"That's what we've come here to do. With portfolios as big as what Google offers and Salesforce, we're looking at growing as a specialist in three areas, CDP which Salesforce calls data cloud, and MuleSoft and then data engineering as-a-service are the three areas we focus on in the UK.

Elliott Management investment

Activist investor Elliott Management Corp. made a multibillion-dollar investment in Salesforce at the start of the year.

Commenting on the big money move, Timm gave his thoughts from a partner perspective.

"I think that the reality is, Salesforce as a technology was built off passion. My almost decade experience with working with Salesforce was everything around what they would call ‘true to the cause'. So about building technology that made people excited. That investment I think changed the state of play in a major way and made it more economically driven.

"Which for any organisation at a point in time becomes the reality of business. But I think that the feeling you'll find from a lot of a lot of partners is that culturally there's been a shift in the dynamic and I think that it feels more like the other big tech companies than it did maybe five years ago. I'm not saying that's a bad thing but there's definitely been a change in they go-to-market and their overall culture.

"From a partner perspective, I think what has given us is a big investment in the partners. We've been able to scale up on industry clouds and even Mulesoft for example, because of the big investment they've made in helping their partners be successful.

"There's definitely two sides to the coin. I think it's an incredible success story and engine that Mark Benioff and the team have built."

Challenges for 2023

While business growth presents many opportunities for companies of all sizes, it of course comes with its challenges.

Timm acknowledged the dearth of IT talent impacting the industry currently and admitted CloudSmiths is no exception.

"For anyone in tech the biggest challenge is access to skill resources and also the work from home post Covid environment creates challenges around skilling resources," he said.

"So whilst we're a hybrid business and we have people working across 14 countries, the reality is that to take people from intermediate to senior requires an investment and doing that remotely is a challenge, which means the only way to grow that capability is too hire in, and that's often more expensive.

"We've got various programmes around upskilling, we've got an internship programme, we work with universities.

"But our number one challenge is access to resource at the moment."