Accenture announced earlier today that it’s acquiring Atlanta-based Cloud Sherpas and its 1,100 employees. Pardot was founded in March of 2007 and a few months later Michael Cohn was in our office giving me the pitch for his new startup, Cloud Sherpas. Michael saw the upcoming shift to the cloud and built one of the first cloud-only consulting firms.
Cloud Sherpas initially focused on helping companies migrate from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. Over time, the company grew dramatically and eventually became one of the largest Salesforce.com consulting companies, hence Accenture’s announcement of the deal on the first day of Dreamforce 2015.
According to Inc. magazine, here are the revenues for Cloud Sherpas over the past three years:
- 2012 – $75 million
- 2013 – $113 million
- 2014 – $134 million
Accenture is trading at roughly 2x revenue (NYSE:ACN), so I have to believe Cloud Sherpas was acquired for a much higher revenue multiple.
Congrats to Michael and the entire team on building a great company and finding an excellent home for it!
David Cummings on Startups 
I am thinking $300mm+. Nice work guys. That doesn’t include the spinoff of Better Cloud tech biz.
Thanks for the kind words, David. Its been an amazing journey. Out at DF15 right now with the Sherpa gang, but looking forward to catching up soon!
Congrats to MIchael and the entire CloudSherpas team. Jon Hallet deserves a little named credit as well. Michael had the vision. Jon knows how to execute.