PwC acquires South African Salesforce reseller Agilitude
In a bid to tap into the ever-expanding Salesforce market across the African continent, PwC has consolidated its position in the market through the acquisition of Agilitude, a leading Salesforce reseller and a platinum consulting partner in South Africa. The value of the deal was not disclosed.
Big Four professional services firm PwC has in recent years been consistently expanding its services in the cloud computing arena across its global outfit. Within its technology arm, enhancing its Salesforce footprint is a key part of the strategy: Salesforce is the world’s leading cloud-based Customer Relationship Management platform that assists companies with everything from data analytics to sales and marketing.
M&A is proving to be an integral part of PwC's Salesforce growth plan – the consulting firm for instance purchased Outbox in 2016 and last week in the UK, the Big Four firm acquired Salesforce consulting firm cDecisions.
PwC’s expansion strategy has now received a substantial boost in Africa with the acquisition of Agilitude, which is a leading authorised reseller of Salesforce technology in South Africa. Established in 2013, Agilitude became a Salesforce member in 2014 and a marketing cloud platform in 2015 before becoming a platinum consulting partner with the firm in 2016.
Since it’s founding, the IT consultancy has expanded its base beyond South Africa to other regions as well, providing services to small and medium firms as well as larger blue-chip firms. The services include implementation of digital workplace solutions, customer experience management, data integration, mobile app development, business insights, as well as digital marketing.
With the acquisition of Agilitude, PwC becomes, according to its own competitive benchmarking, the leading provider of customer services on the Salesforce platform across the African continent, although the competition from the likes of Deloitte, EY, Accenture and Capgemini is heating up. "Agilitude not only has a customer base that spans a large portion of the continent, but also has an office in Kenya, which allows for broad-based running of operations as well," said Ricardo Rosa, a Partner in PwC’s Technology Advisory division.
He added, “The acquisition is both a strategic and cultural fit for our business and a key step in accordance with our strategy and in line with our African growth plans. We identified Agilitude as being a great strategic fit given its business and service focus offering, strong client base and its cohesive, recognised team of professionals.”
Meanwhile, Quinton Pienaar, who was CEO of Agilitude and is now a Partner and Director for PwC said he is pleased to combine his firm's skills and innovative approach with the global scale and expertise of PwC. "PwC has developed strong relationships with their customers, helping them solve important problems within their business strategy, operating models and human capital domains. This acquisition will allow PwC to strengthen its capability to support our clients in the customer acquisition, service, community and marketing space and also strengthens the Salesforce team in Africa."
He concluded, "We see this as a significant step in establishing PwC Africa as the leading customer technology and consulting service provider on the continent.”
According to Salesforce itself, PwC's depth and breadth of Salesforce services makes it one of the globe's top consulting firms for Salesforce advisory and implementation.
