There’s probably no one with more experience in the Salesforce consultancy business than Eric Berridge, who co-founded Bluewolf, one of the very first technology services companies to focus solely on Salesforce implementations, in 2001. After leading Bluewolf as CEO for almost 19 years, followed by two years leading Salesforce’s in-house professional services organization, yesterday he stepped into the role of CEO at Coastal Cloud, a Salesforce consultancy headquartered in Palm Coast, Florida. We caught up with him to find out what has tempted him back into the fray.
With a little over 500 employees, Coastal Cloud is a similar size to Bluewolf at the time it was acquired by IBM in 2016. It was founded a little over ten years ago by two Accenture alumni as a project to support disaster relief in Florida with Salesforce technology. From that beginning Coastal Cloud has developed a substantial public sector and non-profit practice, and later expanded into commercial areas including healthcare, education and manufacturing. Berridge, who has served on the company’s board since 2020, says:
They reminded me a lot of the journey that we went on … Similar to how we built Bluewolf, they hired people they knew one at a time, they got some scale, and really filled that gap that sits just below the GSI where customers want to move fast. They want agility. They want to show results in short sprints. That was a similarity that I saw.
