Salesforce partner Ebicus specialized in Application Management & Maintenance

Van der Meer appears to be on the right place: he believes in Ebicus’ vision. “In the world of Salesforce, application management and maintenance has always been a little bit neglected, because the perception is that it is no longer necessary in the cloud. ‘Salesforce will take care of that’, customers think often. The reality, however, is much different.

Salesforce as a platform has grown so fast and became more complex over time that there is much more effort and focus involved to get the best out of the Salesforce investment after the implementation. “That, he says, requires the right choices and specific skills in a partner.” Cloud has become a business party, but for management and maintenance you need a lot of IT knowledge. Many of our people have done studies like computer science. In that sense, we are a somewhat more a traditional IT company and that is precisely our strength.”

Implementing innovations more efficiently

With its experienced Salesforce team, Ebicus provides tailored services. This can vary from the unburdening of customers by completely managing the Salesforce environment, to providing specific expertise to complement an existing Salesforce maintenance team. For customers, these dedicated services are more than welcome, notes Van Rijswijck.

“You see that Salesforce customers often struggle to get management and maintenance right, in part because Salesforce has become increasingly complex. But we also hear other challenges from Salesforce customers such as cost reduction after an implementation, no fit with the current implementation partner, and problems finding and retaining Salesforce expertise. As a result, customers need more and more time, capacity and budget. It keeps them away or slowing down from using important new modules, releases or extensions. We bring back the balance between sufficient innovations and deployment of maintenance capacity and management costs. Maintenance costs then becomes a healthy twenty percent of the effort again, leaving eighty percent to work on important innovations. This also lowers the TCO, by about twenty percent on average. We give Salesforce customers the flexibility back to keep innovating and take away the pain points mentioned, which they very clearly experience.”

“We always take a multidisciplinary approach to this,” Van Rijswijck continues. “The Salesforce Managed Services team consists of a diverse group of just under 20 professionals: from analyst to architect, from developer to administrator and from configurator to product owner. Together they support a large number of customers. They can help with all Salesforce products, as well as backup management, release management and automatic testing, among other things. If you were to outsource all those different activities to say one freelance consultant, then you really have a challenge. With our team, we can guarantee availability, continuity and a lot of knowledge.” 

“Part of our services and knowledge include, for example, Mulesoft integrations,” he continued. “We have also developed a code scan, which does a health check of the IT environment at 140 points. To embrace the Salesforce Ohana completely, as part of our Managed Services we can also deploy a solution from Whatfix , an ISV partner of Salesforce, to increase the important User Adoption.”

First in the Benelux

Salesforce itself also has an increasing focus on management and maintenance. Van der Meer: Salesforce also realized the challenges often arose after a successful implementation. The solution had to be transferred to the customer’s maintenance organization (if any), but in many situations it was simply not there, or not yet properly set up. For Salesforce, that does present a danger. With a subscription model, you want customers to continue to get the most out of their environment. And a high User Adoption. That’s why they came up with this MSP program last year.”