I put it to Eric Berridge that Bluewolf has enjoyed a nice ride on the back of the tidal wave generated by the towering, serial successes of Salesforce.com.

“Come ON, Martin!” a voice booms down the line from New York where the company is headquartered. “We created that wave!”

He’s kidding of course but it’s to Bluewolf’s credit that Berridge and co. saw the opportunity to build a consulting business before Salesforce had even celebrated its first birthday. Bluewolf has been working with Salesforce for nearly all the latter’s 15-year history, passing on best-practice counsel and advising customers on how to get the most out of the Salesforce ecosystem, as well as other advice on how to make the most out of their own people.

So was that historic alliance down to just plain dumb luck or was it the act of a visionary seer?

“It was clear to us that it was a sea change compared to a Siebel, Oracle or traditional on-premise software,” Berridge says.

But what nobody knew was whether Salesforce would scale and whether its leaders had the ability to put in all the cogs, pipes and gears to fulfil its promise, from APIs to additional clouds beyond salesforce automation, and company acquisitions. When Salesforce and Bluewolf started out, lots of people questioned whether Salesforce would ever sell in large volumes, whether it could prove its security model, expand beyond core CRM, scale to meet the needs of enterprises, and so on. Not so many people ask those questions now as Salesforce has grown to become a $6bn revenue company and still fast-growing.

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