PwC expands Salesforce capabilities with acquisition of Venerate
PwC has beefed up its technology consulting practice in India with the acquisition of Venerate, a Salesforce platinum partner with around 150 employees.
The deal is PwC’s inaugural technology acquisition in India, but according to Arnab Basu, national leader of the Advisory practice, “the first among many such deals that can be expected to be seen in the near future.”
Globally, PwC has committed a war chest of $12 billion to bolsters its capabilities in emerging technology areas such as artificial intelligence, cloud, cybersecurity, and digital. A significant share of this capital is reserved for inorganic growth, with Venerate coming hot on the heels of a deal in Canada and a deal in the US.
Founded in 2016, Bangalore-based Venerate builds and deploys customised solutions on the Salesforce platform across multiple clouds including Financial Services Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Vlocity Industry Cloud and various integration tools. The firm has bagged multiple Salesforce recognitions during its journey, and currently sits in the platinum partner tier.
“Salesforce work has become a key area of client demand. Venerate will augment our Salesforce consulting practice with significant end-to-end capabilities in the areas of platform engineering, and cloud and managed services,” said Sanjeev Krishan, Chairman of PwC in India.
Post-closing, PwC’s Salesforce practice will grow to 700+, making it “the largest Salesforce practice in the country,” according to Basu.
Basu added that PwC has no ambitions to compete with the offerings of IT consultancies, with focus predominantly on the technology build side of work. “Our focus is on bringing business and technology together. The position is not to aspire to becoming a TCS or Infosys. We are a consulting firm and will continue being a consulting company.”
“However, today, you can’t do transformation without a technology platform that offers scale. With our technology investments, we are building these capabilities and scale,” Basu said.
Pawan Kumar, Leader of PwC’s Technology Consulting practice, added: “At PwC, we leverage technology to help solve complex business problems, continuously innovate and identify new opportunities for our clients and other stakeholders. The addition of Venerate will deepen and broaden our capabilities in the Salesforce space.”
Salesforce is one of PwC’s many technology alliances, with Microsoft, AWS, SAP and Oracle among the more well-known software vendors the Big Four regularly works with. PwC’s technology group currently employs 9,000 people serving the domestic market. This is apart from a similarly large team that works for the firm’s technology delivery center – this business serves clients outside of India.
