Tquila limits hangover associated with Salesforce migrations

When it comes to the flood of public relations pitches that I receive on a daily basis for this column -- some really well-targeted, some not-so-much -- there are certain missives guaranteed to capture my attention.

When it comes to the subject of this column, Salesforce.com Platinum integrator Tquila, the connection was pretty obvious. How could I not be curious about a company that has chosen to name itself after an adult libation? 

Over the past 30 months, Tquila has established itself as a go-to partner for European businesses seeking to invest in the Salesforce platform -- operating out of offices in London and Munich. Now, it's actively building a presence in Asia.

"We are known for our deep experience in delivering transformative solutions built on the platform, and our ability to support innovators within large enterprise companies," Paul Andrew, co-founder and chief strategy office for Tquila, wrote me in the pitch to capture my attention. "We have also built a range of accelerators to address issues customers want to build on cloud, like mobile-first, location awareness, offline-access, and consumer apps with rich UI/UX. These allow our clients to build and deploy applications in exceptionally short time frames and 'crush the time to value.' "

Great branding aside, what Tquila focuses on managing for its clients is the organization angst -- the hangover if you will -- that can bubble up around cloud application development or migration projects when companies are trying to mix too many competing agendas.

"No matter how impactful a cloud project promises to be, it's usually tough to get stakeholders aligned, to manage the associated shift in user priorities," Andrew told me when I interviewed him a few weeks ago. "We can take a good idea and prove its value in a matter of weeks."

Getting to that point is crucial for winning over skeptics, he said. 

One subject about which Andrew is particularly vocal is the notion that cloud adoption among European companies is lagging that of their U.S. counterparts, as it did during the early days of the PC industry and enterprise applications rollouts. In fact, cloud services are accelerating the pace of innovation and risk-taking, he believes.

"Europe is no longer four to five years behind," Andrew said. "There is just as much of an appetite for innovation as the rest of the world. If you look at the driving force, it is coming out of users. The users are benchmarking what they have [personally] with what they want [at work]. This has set the new standard for application design."

For now, Tquila is exclusively focused on deployments involving Salesforce and the eco-system of ISVs that has cropped up around the platform.

The company employs approximately 100 Salesforce professionals, and its publicly declared client list includes the likes of the Financial Times, Johnson & Johnson, Burberry, Credit Suisse, H.R. Owen, London Capital Group, and Workshare.