If you use Google Apps or Salesforce, today’s announcement of the Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne merger is good news for you. Why? Because two of the largest and most visionary cloud services companies are joining forces, which means customers will see the benefits of the scale and innovation that results.
CloudSherpas is among the largest resellers of Google Apps, and was named Google’s Enterprise Partner of the Year for 2011. GlobalOne is similar in stature, but is focused mainly on the Salesforce.com ecosystem. Since Google Apps and SFDC are two of the most widely adopted business cloud applications, the merger means that a single company will now have a strong presence in two of the top cloud markets.
Jeff Kaplan from ThinkStrategies also reports that a new investment was made in the combined company as part of the deal.
The new company also picked up $20 million in new funding from Columbia Capital, which invested $15 million in GlobalOne last year. The new round of funding will be used to extend Cloud Sherpas’ reach into new geographic regions, develop new vertical market solutions, and expand its portfolio of cloud-based applications that encourage cloud interoperability.
Cloud offerings have often been sold direct and piecemeal, not as the full solutions that are more common in on-premise deployments. As more companies move to the cloud, I expect to see service providers offering more complete packages similar to their on-premise counterparts. This merger is a step in that direction.
So if you find yourself moving to the cloud and in need of CRM, email, or office productivity solutions, I suspect the new combined company, which will retain the CloudSherpas name, will be a powerful one-stop shop for all your needs.
And of course, if you need a backup for your business Gmail, or a Salesforce.com backup, then Backupify is happy to help. Backup was a best practice on premise, and it’s a best practice in the cloud. So get started backing up your Google Apps data with a free 15-day trial from Backupify.
