PUBLISHED DATE: 2025-08-13 20:19:18

HFS HORIZONS REPORT: Salesforce Service Providers, 2025

An assessment of the leading service providers in Salesforce innovation

Authors:
Sam Duncan, Practice Leader
Krupa KS, Senior Analyst

Excerpt for Publicis Sapient

Salesforce is at the forefront of transforming customer experiences as enterprises move from modular deployments to holistic transformation engagements. Now, generative AI (GenAI) and Agentforce have the potential to redefine how organizations interact with their customers, and enterprises are turning to service providers to make it a reality.

In response, leading service providers are working to quickly upskill their workforces, expand industry expertise, build stronger ecosystems, and embrace innovative ways of working to help enterprises get the most out of their Salesforce investments.

Contents

1. Introduction and Research Methodology

Organizations of all sizes are increasingly prioritizing customer-centric approaches. This means a growing focus on real-time engagement, enhanced data privacy, and developing new omnichannel experiences. To get there, enterprises often turn to service firms to help them plan, implement, and manage software-as-a-service solutions—including Salesforce.

The HFS Horizons: Salesforce Services, 2024 report assesses how well service providers are helping their Salesforce clients to embrace innovation and realize value across three distinct Horizons:

The report evaluates the capabilities of 19 service providers across the HFS Salesforce services value chain based on a range of dimensions to understand the why, what, how, and so what of their offerings. It highlights the value-based positioning for each participant across the three distinct Horizons and includes detailed profiles of each service provider, outlining their provider facts, strengths, and development opportunities. The report is global in scope and offers critical insights for enterprises of all shapes and sizes, service providers offering Salesforce services, and ecosystem partners.

Executive Summary

  1. The Leaders
    HFS assessed 19 service providers across value propositions, innovation capabilities, go-to-market strategies, and market impact criteria. The leaders in Horizon 3 are Accenture, Cognizant, Deloitte, IBM, Infosys, Publicis Sapient, PwC, and TCS. These providers demonstrated their ability to help enterprises of all sizes drive ecosystem value, create new experiences, and develop 360-degree views of customers through Salesforce. Shared characteristics among the leaders include strong capabilities across the full Salesforce suite of products, deep expertise in key industries, a strong focus on innovation and co-creation with clients, and an established ecosystem of partners to pull into engagements.
  2. Enterprises Still Battle License Costs
    Enterprises are becoming increasingly cost-conscious as macroeconomic headwinds force them to prioritize their spending ruthlessly, impacting Salesforce services expenditure. One of the top priorities of 2024 was license optimization to reduce costs. Service providers are arming themselves with the tools to make this a reality, helping enterprises analyze usage and ensure full use of features to drive down cost and extract maximum value from existing investments. This is particularly important as enterprises look to fund Salesforce Data Cloud and Agentforce investments.
  3. Industry-Specific Solutions Continue to Grow
    Salesforce is driving the adoption of industry-specific solutions by launching Health Cloud and Financial Services Cloud, which allow enterprises to leverage tailored tools, workflows, and integrations designed for unique industry-specific applications. For example, Health Cloud helps firms create patient-centric experiences, while Financial Services Cloud offers compliance-ready tools and solutions. Service providers are complementing these solutions with deep domain expertise, their own tools and accelerators, and integrating emerging technologies such as automation and AI to accelerate implementation times and drive improved outcomes.
  4. AI as a Transformative Force in the Ecosystem
    Salesforce is embedding AI features into its own suite of products. Salesforce Einstein is a familiar name in the industry, and the company recently announced Agentforce 2.0—a platform that delivers a ‘limitless workforce’ using AI agents. Service providers are already working to develop their own AI toolkits and upskill their existing talent to ensure they help enterprises navigate the rise of AI—some are even driving co-innovation with their clients. At the core of AI for Salesforce is Data Cloud, which pulls real-time data from multiple sources to feed tools such as Agentforce. There is a significant rise in the number of enterprises seeking support for complex Data Cloud implementations, including data strategies, to ensure they are well-equipped to drive transformation with AI.
  5. Voice of the Customers and Partners
    Enterprises across the board report satisfaction with their service providers’ understanding of Salesforce’s suite of products, service quality, and geographic reach. However, there was widespread agreement that the providers should focus on achieving more cost savings, developing deeper industry-specific expertise, and driving greater revenue impact for their clients. Partners have appreciated their strong execution capabilities but highlighted the need to enhance collaborative innovation and embrace ecosystems to drive more value for their enterprise clients.

The HFS Salesforce Services Value Chain

The HFS Salesforce Service Providers 2025 report looks beyond implementation and IT-centric use cases for innovation and transformation. Key aspects include transformational outcomes, industry-specific solutions, and innovative use cases, focusing on the enterprise and service provider view.

19 Service Providers Evaluated in This Report

Accenture, Cognizant, Deloitte, Dextara Datamatics, Globant, IBM, Infosys, KPMG, LTIMindtree, Movate, Mphasis Silverline, The Next Applied, NTT DATA, Persistent, Publicis Sapient, PwC, Randstad Digital, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), Tech Mahindra, Virtusa

Sources of Data

This Horizons research report relies on multiple data sources to support our methodology and help HFS obtain a well-rounded perspective on the service capabilities of the participating organizations covered in our study. The sources are as follows:

The Study Seeks to Address Multiple Questions

Horizons Assessment Methodology: Salesforce Service Providers

The HFS Horizons: Salesforce Services report evaluated service providers’ capabilities across a range of dimensions to understand the why, what, how, and so what of their Salesforce offerings. Our assessment is based on inputs from clients, partners, and employees and augmented with analyst perspectives.

Assessment Dimensions (Weighting):

2. Market Dynamics

Our Key Learnings While Conducting This Study

  1. One-size-fits-all is no longer an option
    Salesforce implementations are becoming increasingly complex as enterprises operate with different levels of digital maturity, with individual challenges and desired outcomes. Service providers have been forced to evolve beyond standardized delivery models to ones with flexibility at the core and a deep understanding of each client’s unique circumstances, for example, operating in heavily regulated industries. Salesforce recognized this with its new infrastructure, Hyperforce, which allows the use of major public clouds and enables enhanced flexibility among other benefits, meaning enterprises can drive incremental transformation with a tailored roadmap.
  2. Pricing continues to be a top challenge
    Enterprises across the board expressed frustration around complex and opaque cost models, ranging from pay-as-you-go to tiered licensing models. For example, Agentforce is priced at $2 per conversation. This remains a roadblock to transformation as enterprises struggle to justify further spending on the likes of Data Cloud and Agentforce until they optimize their current licensing costs. Savvy service providers are working with Salesforce to introduce outcome-based pricing. Others are combining tools such as Salesforce Optimizer with their own expertise to help clients maximize existing investments and align them to tangible business outcomes.
  3. Data and AI are driving innovation
    Salesforce Data Cloud and Agentforce are two of Salesforce’s flagship products, but they require significant investment in time and money before delivering maximum value. Enterprises rely on service providers to make this a reality, and forward-thinking firms are already reaping the rewards as they benefit from real-time insights and personalized customer experiences. Throughout our conversations with enterprises, we heard use cases ranging from automated content generation to conversational commerce and intelligent case management.
  4. Industry-specific clouds continue to rise
    In response to the growing need for tailored solutions, Salesforce is developing its catalog of purpose-built clouds with industry-specific workflows, integrated compliance tools, and customer dashboards. Enterprises are turning to industry clouds to benefit from domain expertise, accelerated implementation times, and support with regulatory compliance, among a host of other unique benefits. However, enterprises tell us they still face challenges with additional license fees having complex cost structures, tricky integrations with their existing legacy systems, and customization issues that bring their own set of problems.
  5. Co-innovation is becoming a differentiator
    Enterprises are increasingly taking ownership of their technology initiatives rather than outsourcing them, which is why co-innovation is growing exponentially. It allows enterprises to jointly test and deploy customized solutions and bespoke applications and future-proof their infrastructure against upcoming technologies. Smart service providers are already establishing joint innovation studios with their clients, typically leveraging outcome-based models to explore exciting opportunities such as GenAI applications. While co-innovation is a differentiator today, we expect it to become commonplace in the Salesforce ecosystem if providers wish to remain competitive.
  6. Sustainability and ESG initiatives are gaining momentum
    HFS’s research indicates that sustainability and ESG initiatives are a priority for every enterprise, including Salesforce implementation. Salesforce made sustainability one of its core values and developed its own Sustainability Cloud for enterprises to track their carbon footprint and manage ESG data. Service providers are working to help enterprises improve their environmental impact by optimizing their tools and accelerators to be more eco-friendly and identifying opportunities to streamline operations for environmental efficiency.

Enterprises are largely satisfied with their providers, but partners struggle with commercial models, talent, and IP challenges

Client and Partner Ratings (Average, scale of 1 to 10):

Sample: HFS Horizons survey, Salesforce service providers, 26 client and 20 partner references (Source: HFS Research, 2025)

3. Horizons Results: Salesforce Service Providers, 2025

HFS Horizons: Summary of Providers Assessed in This Report

HFS Horizons for Salesforce Service Providers

4. Publicis Sapient Profile: Salesforce Service Providers, 2025

Publicis Sapient: Unlocking New Doors with Marketing Relationships and Strong Data Cloud Expertise

Strengths

Development Opportunities

Partnerships

Key partners: Salesforce, META, Google, AWS, Epsilon

Clients

Number of clients: Not disclosed
Key clients: ASDA, Pandora, Wingstop, UPS, The Container Store

Global Operations and Resources

Headcount: Not disclosed
Delivery and innovation locations by major geo: 59 globally

Flagship Internal IP

5. HFS Research Authors

Sam Duncan

Practice Leader
sam.duncan@hfsresearch.com

Sam Duncan is a Practice Leader at HFS, based in Cambridge, UK. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a degree in economics. His interest in macroeconomics focuses on how the evolution of technology accelerated globalization. He also studied law, accounting, and investment management. Since joining HFS, Sam has developed his understanding of blockchain and continues exploring the latest applications of the technology across various industries. He applies his economics background to keep up with the latest banking and financial services industry trends and has a keen interest in insurance. He regularly contributes to the HFS Market Index, a quarterly report breaking down the performance and key events of the leading service providers throughout the previous quarter.

Krupa KS

Senior Analyst
krupa.ks@hfsresearch.com

Krupa is a Senior Analyst at HFS Research and is a part of data products. She is responsible for ITO-BPO outsourcing contracts, merger and acquisition data collection and analysis for different service lines. She also works with practice leads with a focus on business process services and digital technologies. Krupa has over four years of experience in business research and analysis in Excellence4U Research Services and Futurecorp Consulting. She was a part of the market research team, where her responsibilities included performing secondary research for company profiling, industry analysis, and competitive analysis. At Excellence4U, she worked with the technology mapping team that learned about clients’ businesses and how products are used by the target audiences, helping her clients better understand their customers’ needs.

About HFS

INNOVATIVE | INTREPID | BOLD

HFS Research is a leading global research and advisory firm helping Fortune 500 companies through IT and business transformation with bold insights and actionable strategies. With an unmatched platform to reach, advise, and influence Global 2000 executives, we empower organizations to make decisive technology and service choices. Backed by fearless research and an impartial outside perspective, our insights give you the edge to stay ahead.

www.hfsresearch.com
www.horsesforsources.com
www.horsesmouthpodcast.com