SaaS providers, from well-known platforms to niche players, are calling on consulting and integration partners to build and market their clouds to the industry.
The activity underscores a general trend of verticalization in cloud ecosystems. The driving principle: The cloud vertical must meet the specific needs of the customer’s industry for supporting digital transformation.
“Industry clouds are the enabler for innovation and automation of industry-specific business processes,” said Chris Thomas, principal of cloud technology at Deloitte, which partners with cloud providers. Thomas noted that 74% of executives identified as cloud leaders in a 2022 Deloitte survey cited industry clouds as the catalyst for change.
The following cloud alliances illustrate the pattern:
work day, which offers cloud-based enterprise applications in human capital management and finance, last week launched an Industry Accelerator initiative. It will initially partner with Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC.
Slack, a Salesforce company that offers a cloud-based business messaging application, last week said it is teaming up with Salesforce consulting partners to deliver industry-specific Slack offerings. The first wave of Slack Partner Industry Solutions will address verticals, including financial services, manufacturing, communications, retail, media and technology.
Cropan AgTech specialist supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, earlier this month launched an industry cloud for agriculture and plans to expand its work with system integrators and other partners.
Some partners, on the contrary, enlist cloud providers. Tata Consulting Services (TCS), a Mumbai-based IT services company, is partnering with Salesforce on an automotive industry cloud. TCS is promoting its cloud offering at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, which ends this week.
Partner centers in Workday accelerators
The industry’s cloud push plays to the strengths of consulting and IT service providers that have historically maintained industry expertise, often organizing practices along vertical market lines. For cloud providers, such partners provide digital transformation skills and experience to strengthen their industry strategies.
Workday’s Industry Accelerators, which debuted at the company’s Workday Rising event, are engaging partners to address the need for digital transformation, particularly in the areas of finance and operations.
“Digital transformation for the CFO’s office is a big topic right now,” said Pete Schlampp, chief strategy officer at Workday. “What we’re trying to do with industry accelerators is say, ‘We have an onramp for you in your industry.'”
Industry clouds bring together a mix of partners.
The Workday ecosystem currently offers accelerators for the banking/capital markets, healthcare, insurance and technology sectors. Partners contribute to accelerators in several ways. For one, they create predefined configurations that focus on a specific industry. Workday’s business process framework enables partners to leverage their industry knowledge to configure the company’s SaaS applications.
This differs from customizing software to meet industry needs, which is an approach some industry clouds take, Schlampp said. Workday keeps all of its customers on the same code base, which it says provides for a common data model that enables machine learning, better automation and improved personalization.
The second type of accelerator is a connector that integrates Workday with an industry-oriented, third-party application.
Finally, Workday and its partners will work together on what Schlampp describes as “packaged offerings” that reside in Workday’s cloud. The company, working with partners, plans to publish 25 such offers this year, many of which are industry specific. Co-innovation relationships have become increasingly important in the development of industrial clouds.
Slack taps partners for industry offerings
Slack’s interest in IT service providers is also linked to digital transformation, which the company says requires technology integration, change management and organizational redesign — provided by service partners. Slack’s roster of certified consulting partners includes Accenture, Atrium, Capgemini, Deloitte, Globant, IBM, KPMG, NeuraFlash, PwC, Silverline and Slalom.
Those companies’ cloud offerings are made up of industry-specific use cases, drawing from partners’ previous experience with Slack and various clouds in Salesforce’s portfolio, said Richard Hasslacher, vice president of global alliances and Slack channels.
Participants in the Slack Partner Industry Solutions program also advise customers on the challenges facing knowledge workers. Among those, Hasslacher said, is “context switching” — a productivity drain that occurs when users juggle multiple applications to complete tasks. The partners, he said, could help advance Slack as a coordination layer app as opposed to a complementary communication service.
The partners and their industry use cases “help paint the art of what’s possible for thinking about Slack as an integration and orchestration platform,” Hasslacher said. “The big benefit is the ability to understand how to use Slack more as a change agent than a chat platform.”
As for next steps, Hasslacher said Slack plans to increase the number of industry offerings and the number of partners that provide them. “We are looking to expand this rapidly in the coming quarter,” he said. “There is a real demand from our customers for use cases that specifically address their industry needs.”
Recruiting a tap partner for Cropin
Cropin, headquartered in Bangalore, India, is cultivating partners for its newly launched agriculture cloud. Cropin Cloud aims to provide a platform where agri-businesses, development agencies and management can accelerate digital transformation in the food value chain.
There is a real demand from our customers for use cases that specifically address their industry needs.
Richard HasslacherVice president of global alliances and channels at Slack
Krishna Kumar, Cropin’s CEO and co-founder, said the company’s cloud “will greatly benefit from a strong gaming ecosystem.”
AWS is already a strategic technology and go-to-market partner for Cropin Cloud. The ecosystem also includes regional partners such as PSW Digital, a consulting firm in the Latin American market, and True Digital Group, a digital transformation provider in Thailand and Southeast Asia.
“We continue to scout and develop new partnerships with global system integrators and regional system integrators,” Kumar said.
ISVs and local resellers are also part of Cropin’s ecosystem approach. The partners will help scale the company’s agriculture industry cloud reach and deployment, Kumar added.
TCS is revolutionizing automotive clouds
Targeting the automotive industry, the TCS Mobility Cloud Suite covers use cases and accelerators. Accelerators include business processes and software code to shorten customers’ development cycles, said Partha Reddy, head of manufacturing, energy and resources at TCS Americas.
TCS Mobility Cloud Suite is designed to work with public clouds, SaaS platforms like Salesforce and ServiceNow, TCS’s private cloud, and customers’ private clouds. “Architecture is agnostic,” says Reddy.
In addition, TCS has partnered with Salesforce to create an automotive cloud, which also uses an accelerator approach. The Detroit auto show debut of that offering seems to point to a single-industry focus. But says Frank Diana, futurist and managing partner at TCS, the cloud ecosystem is now moving into cross-industry territory. Auto manufacturers, for example, partner with energy companies and insurance companies.
“That phenomenon requires speed and scale in the context of change,” he said.
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