Subscribe

CloudSmiths Africa appoints Jason Timm as MD

Sibahle Malinga
By Sibahle Malinga, ITWeb senior news journalist.
Johannesburg, 12 Aug 2019
Jason Timm MD and co-founder of CloudSmiths.
Jason Timm MD and co-founder of CloudSmiths.

Software solutions provider CloudSmiths has appointed co-founder Jason Timm as MD for the Africa region.

Established in 2014 by Timm and co-founder Derek Hughes (group CEO), CloudSmiths is a Salesforce consulting partner and reseller.

The company focuses on the implementation, configuration and customisation of Salesforce core customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

The Johannesburg-headquartered company, which is part of software development firm Dynamic Technologies Group, has offices in various parts of SA, Nairobi and London.

Timm was previously sales director of the company. In his new position, he is responsible for formulating and successfully implementing the company policy and its strategic direction.

“Over the last five years, CloudSmiths has become the largest Salesforce cloud partner in Africa, with around 20% to 24% of the local market share,” Timm told ITWeb.

“As MD, my key responsibility is to build people relationships with our key customers, adding more customers and driving growth of the Salesforce market in SA. As a services business, our currency is measured by headcount, so we are on a heavy recruitment drive at the moment to increase our headcount, to accommodate business growth.”

Prior to establishing CloudSmiths, Timm worked as a product specialist at technology solutions provider ACL and as a GM at regulatory compliance software firm Methodware Enterprise Risk Assessor.

US-headquartered Salesforce provides a suite of cloud-based CRM software solutions to large and small enterprises across sectors. The multinational company’s offerings include Marketing Cloud, AppExchange, Service Cloud, Salesforce Essentials, financial services products and call centre management solutions.

In 2016, CloudSmiths merged with competitor, Salesforce consulting partner, Ideas Incorporated.

The deal made CloudSmiths the largest Salesforce specialist in SA. According to the company, the collaboration was made in line with DVT's objective to increase the company’s organic growth through investment into high-growth, high-return software businesses.

Timm says CloudSmiths is working on increasing its product offerings, which includes file hosting service Dropbox, human resources management platforms and the newly introduced SparkSmiths, which are integrated into the Salesforce offerings and can be supplied as a single solution.

“We are always looking to add more value by ensuring our clients have deeply integrated and deeply functional solutions from a user perspective. We utilise Jitterbit, a commercial software integration product, to facilitate transport between legacy, enterprise and on-demand computing applications.”

According to research firm Gartner, the global total spend on CRM software grew 15.6% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018.

The top five CRM software vendors accounted for more than 40% of the total market last year, led by Salesforce (19.5%), SAP (8.3%) and Oracle (5.5%), with Adobe (5.1%) and Microsoft (2.7%) in fourth and fifth place, respectively.

“We realised SA has a strong divide in terms of digital transformation and the majority of businesses are looking to adopt technologies that would take them forward and enable them to successfully compete in industry 4.0,” says Timm.

“In terms of cloud adoption, South African companies are on par with global counterparts and in some sectors, such as financial services, we are at the forefront, as they have a well-rounded appreciation of service value for cloud.”

Share