Model Metrics Came to the Party with an Entourage, But Leaves with Salesforce.com

Model Metric’s website says, “Since its founding in 2003, Model Metrics has become one of the most diversified and respected partners of salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Adobe, and Google.” Given today’s announcement of their acquisition by salesforce.com, that may be about to change; we expect Model Metrics to say good-bye to Amazon, Adobe and Google.

Of salesforce.com’s many recent acquisitions (8 since Jan 2010), this is the only one that is a consulting services play – the rest being apps / tools providers. Saugatuck believes that it reflects recognition on salesforce.com’s part that the marriage of CRM, Mobile and Social requires a significant investment of professional services to conceptualize and build a productive system. Plus, services is less than 10% of SFDC’s revenue and have been growing slower than their subscription revenue over the past 5 years. Model Metrics’ strong growing services business, one that is highly proficient in applying SFDC products, immediately increases SFDC’s capacity.

But what happens to Amazon, Adobe and Google? SFDC could take the approach of IBM Global Services and build on whatever the customer wants, but that seems highly unlikely. Saugatuck believes that Model Metrics (or whatever it is ultimately called) will drop its support for other platforms, but leverages that expertise to improve its own platform development and integration. There’s no official word yet, but if you’re not on SFDC, then you may be out of luck.

Interesting, this come shortly before CloudForce 2011 later this month In New York City, bill as the largest social enterprise industry event on the East coast. Based on several reports from SFDC users, SFDC has been especially aggressive in reaching out to customers of all sizes and encouraging them to attend this event praying on their desire their frustration of trying to make sense of all things social.

As Mike West said in this blog back in September; “Something has changed at Salesforce.  … now the impact of the social networking revolution has permeated everything, and Salesforce has shifted the focus of its evangelism to empowerment of the knowledge worker, the consumer, and the social networks they belong to.” This acquisition is the next step in this journey. We’ll be reporting from CloudForce so stay tuned.