Emtec Launches Wave6 Consulting, Services Practice For Salesforce CRM Customers

Announced Monday, Emtec, a Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle partner based in Radnor, Pa., said it is rolling out a professional services firm, called Wave6, around Salesforce's customer relationship management application.

"There is a definite need in the Salesforce space for specific things that need to be marketed and approached, not as a large systems integrator, but as a medium-sized integrator," said Greg Lewis, president of Chicago, Ill.-based Wave6. "[We will be] focusing on optimizing Salesforce CRM consolidation, integrating and leveraging all those other pieces of Emtec, but heading it up as a Salesforce-focused partner."

[Related: CEO Benioff Says Former Oracle Sales VP Doing 'Phenomenal' Job At Salesforce ]

Salesforce announced its SaaS CRM application Salesforce1 as a new mobile application platform Tuesday, and Lewis said he believes it has major potential for Wave6.

"You can develop mobile applications in a short amount of time and integrate them with Twitter and LinkedIn" sad Lewis. "But what's not talked about at all is this whole world of Salesforce customers around the world needing our help. They are absolute opportunities to optimize Salesforce and realigning their Salesforce instances."

At Salesforce's Dreamforce conference taking place this week in San Francisco, 120,000 people attended, demonstrating its growing buzz, said Lewis.

"Why does Oracle only have 50,000 people attend [its OpenWorld conference] and Salesforce.com, which is just a CRM vendor, have 120,000 people attend?" posited Lewis. "The reason is that Salesforce is prolific. You have a heavy coverage of the small to large business landscape, and on top of that, it's expanding into marketing, customer service and using Salesforce as a mobile platform."

SaaS applications are becoming increasingly popular because they're easy to access and manage, Lewis said.

"[The new Salesforce1] mobile application software was announced, and I installed that new app on my phone and had that technology in my hands in no time while I [was] at a conference," said Lewis. "You can't do that with a non-SaaS application; it's just not accessible, it's easy and that's how people want to work."

Currently, Wave6 is serving different vertical industries in the mid market such as the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, distribution, and financial services, and the company is looking to move into the higher education space, said Lewis.

"We're launching initiatives for higher education with CRM applications, building tracking systems [and] collaborative platforms for students to interact with faculty online in a Twitter-like chatter community," said Lewis. "Within the next 6 months, we're looking to ... go to market and really develop some applications around that."

Wave6 is also actively seeking partners around big data, cloud-based intelligence and application integration, said Lewis.

"From an acquisition stand point, we are actively looking to partner in different spaces like the unstructured big data space," said Lewis. "From a technology standpoint, we have partnerships in Emtec already, and that's a differentiator for us as a Salesforce partner where we already [have partnerships] with Oracle [and] SAP that we leverage."

While the CRM market in 2001 was feeble, today it is stronger than ever, said Lewis.

"The way Salesforce is expanding and really blowing out their software and mobile platform, we are starting to see a whole new phase of people across all industries using this social platform and doing work in a different way," said Lewis. " In our Wave6 story, we want to head into specific markets and develop some IT that will help people leverage this technology."

PUBLISHED NOV. 21, 2013