When evaluating the future of his Salesforce tech services company 7Summits, founder and CEO Paul Stillmank's choices were to either raise more capital via debt equity, go into another private equity fund that would invest in growth equity, or become part of a more strategic company, like tech giant IBM, "that has the wherewithal to move the platform forward with speed," he said.
Stillmank chose the latter.
Earlier this month, IBM announced it acquired 7Summits for an undisclosed amount to build on its investment in Salesforce services. 7Summits will remain based in Milwaukee as a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM.
Since 2009, 7Summits has been connecting customers, partners and employees online through customized community experiences built on the Salesforce platform, while also creating playbooks that help companies successfully drive business benefits, Stillmank said.
During that time, the company created intellectual property – software – that was written on top of the Salesforce platform. 7Summits refers to this software as accelerators, while Salesforce refers to them as Lightning Bolts. 7Summits uses the Salesforce lightning bolt construct to create its own software that further promotes the notion of "pre-built, purpose driven communities" for specific audiences and industries, Stillmank said.
On the Salesforce App exchange, 7Summits has the second-largest library of these kind of assets – or software – which can be thought of as templates to build upon, and with IBM, will be No.1.
This is one of the elements that intrigued IBM, Stillmank said.
IBM, a company that reported $77 billion in revenue in 2019, wasn't after another Salesforce company. What IBM is buying is 7Summits' accelerator libraries and unique process thinking for solving business problems with technology and having accelerators that would allow the company to help customers get in the market quickly. Those digital experiences make processes more efficient and allow businesses to sell more, market in a better way, or onboard partners and employees, Stillmank said.
"This isn’t just about adding more talent, it’s about gaining a competitive advantage from the specialized expertise, software assets, and methods that 7Summits brings," Stillmank said.
With its library of software assets, and now part of IBM, 7Summits cannot just go after software, high-tech, higher education and manufacturing industries, but can also create additional industry-focused communities for financial and insurance services, retail, consumer goods and many other vertical industries that are ripe for disruption, but that need to be more virtualized given environments like this pandemic, Stillmank said.
As workers return to their respective businesses and offices, companies that weren't huge adopters of digital will likely remain working in a digitized atmosphere, "but it will be a different mix, and 7Summits is ready to serve that market," Stillmank added.
In each of the last seven years, 7Summits has experienced growth in the range of 40% and 50%, each year, and Stillmank anticipates similar growth in 2021. In January of 2020, the company moved into a two-story office building at 200 N. Jefferson St. in Milwaukee, giving 7Summits capacity for continued growth.
7Summits has roughly 220 employees, of which 65 to 70 work in Milwaukee. Other employees live in 30 other states with the strongest concentrations in Chicago; Indianapolis; Atlanta; Austin, Texas; New York City; and Minneapolis. The company is still hiring, including an additional six people since Jan. 1 and as many as 12 new hires over the winter holidays.
