Who Joined Forces To Create A New Cloud Service Provider?

The new company, to be called Cloud Sherpas, also said it has received $20 million in funding from investment company Columbia Capital.

David Northington, former CEO of GlobalOne, will take over as CEO of Cloud Sherpas. Former Cloud Sherpas CEO Douglas Shepard will continue as president of Cloud Sherpas’ Google business unit.

“We’ve brought together two of the leading partners of two of the leading software companies -- Google and Salesforce.com,” Northington said in an interview with CRN Monday. “We can provide quite a complete bit of expertise to help businesses integrate cloud solutions into an enterprise environment.”

Cloud Sherpas, a Google Apps partner, recently was named by Google as its Enterprise 2011 Partner of the Year, while GlobalOne is a Salesforce.com Platinum Partner, integrating its SaaS-based enterprise CRM applications.

Northington also said Cloud Sherpas will use the funding to expand into other geographic areas and will work on expanding its portfolio.

“Clients are facing challenges of cloud applications, infrastructure options, platform choices, and their options change over time,” he said. “As service providers, we’ve got to be aware of that and perhaps expand our footprint as we go forward.”

The merger presents a challenge for traditional managed service providers who may want to expand beyond traditional IT infrastructure implementations, said Jeff Kaplan, managing director of Wellesley, Mass-based consultancy Thinkstrategies.

“From the managed services point of view, it shows the growing interest in a variety of cloud services,” Kaplan said. “These managed services providers may want to think about delivering cloud managed services, or partnering with a provider like Cloud Sherpas that are providing those managed services.”

The new Cloud Sherpas will have offices in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and San Francisco; in Sydney, Brisbane and Wellington, Australia; as well as in Manila, Philippines.

The company will have almost 300 employees and currently has more than 1,500 clients across varying industries.