IBM, Bluewolf launch new Salesforce practice in India, to train 500 staff

Global technology giant IBM today announced the launch of a new practice to drive digital transformation and customer experience locally in India with global CRM company Salesforce, through their Salesforce consulting arm Bluewolf.

As part of this initiative, IBM is training 500 employees in the Bluewolf Salesforce methodology at their Bengaluru premises. IBM had acquired Bluewolf, a global Salesforce partner company, in 2016.

“Giving developers the ability to integrate IBM Watson services into Salesforce will combine insights from unstructured data inside or outside an enterprise and customer data delivered by Salesforce Einstein to enable smarter, faster decisions across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more,” said Lula Mohanty, Managing Partner, GBS, IBM.

Both Watson and Einstein are proprietary artificial intelligence products of IBM and Salesforce respectively.

The dedicated practice will leverage Bluewolf’s deep expertise and delivery capabilities in Salesforce, augmented intelligence (AI), and innovation strategy, combined with IBM’s leadership in cognitive and design-thinking, to help clients - of any industry - connect customer experience to value.

According to Bluewolf’s Annual State of Salesforce report, 88 percent of IT professionals say the top two reasons their organization use Salesforce is for customer acquisition and retention, above all other business goals. The increasing market demand for Salesforce demonstrates an equally compelling need for Bluewolf; as one of the platform's longest-standing Global Strategic Consulting Partners, with the scale and reach of IBM.

“Globally we have over 14,000 people trained on Bluewolf. In Bengaluru, we have a Garage dedicated to this where about 500 people are being trained  currently and the aspirations are to scale up to 1,000 people,” added Mohanty.

The Garage focuses on training employees in Bluewolf methodology and practices, while IBM has Garages dedicated to different partner environments and segments, sandboxes, and cloud platforms.

IBM is will focus on identifying SMEs and e-commerce sectors for these products while strongly focusing the existing customer base from telecom utilities and financial services.

IBM is already implementing Salesforce solution for up to 200 clients across the country. “As we start to build these Garages, they are meant for businesses, individual developers and solution players to play with what (services) we have got to offer,” added Mohanty.

“As we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we will continue to empower companies of all sizes and industries to redefine customer experiences putting AI to use inside their organizations, in a future where AI will reshape every aspect of work making smarter decisions faster than ever before,” said Sunil Jose, SVP and Country Leader, Salesforce India.
Last year, IBM and Salesforce announced a global strategic solution to deliver joint solutions designed to leverage artificial intelligence.