Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced a new study from IDC that finds Salesforce and its ecosystem of partners in the UAE will create 20,300 new jobs and USD 3.9 billion in new business revenues by 2026. The study also finds that Salesforce is driving immense growth for its partner ecosystem in the UAE, which will make USD 6.30 for every USD 1 Salesforce makes locally by 2026.

[Tableau embed: Global new jobs, new business revenue & partner ecosystem: link https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/salesforce.newsroom1206/viz/IDCSalesforceEconomy2021CountryMap/D_IDC_Map?publish=yes]

Building digital HQs solves for urgent transformation needs

In the Middle East and Africa, IDC forecasts¹ that cloud-related technologies will enable businesses to focus on establishing their digital HQs to deliver customer and employee success from anywhere. Remote work, contactless customer engagement, and sustainability efforts are becoming more prevalent than ever, and IDC expects this trend will only continue.

As more companies build out their digital HQs to support an increasingly remote workforce, Salesforce technologies have helped its customers adjust to uncertainty – enabling remote work and remote contact with customers, and making it possible to develop new products in weeks, not months².

Salesforce technologies can also help companies plan for a more sustainable future. IDC forecasts that from 2021 to 2024, global migration from on-premise software to the cloud could reduce as much as 1 billion metric tons of CO2³. Salesforce itself has set a goal of pursuing 100% renewable energy for its global operations by 2022, and currently delivers a carbon-neutral cloud to all its customers.

“The Salesforce economy in the UAE is set to generate USD 3.9 billion in new revenue and create 20,300 new jobs by 2026 – underlining the importance of cloud-based digital transformation in fueling the UAE’s diversified economic growth,” said Thierry Nicault, Area Vice President – Middle East and North Africa, Salesforce.

“The Salesforce partner ecosystem is critical for extending the power of Salesforce to companies of all sizes and industries,” added Thierry Nicault. “At Salesforce, we’re committed to expanding our partner ecosystem, and creating new pathways to the emerging technology jobs of the future.”

Salesforce paves pathways to help unlock career opportunities in the Salesforce Economy

In the UAE, many new jobs created in the Salesforce customer base this year leverage significant digital skills — such as using automation tools, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other complex applications. Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, and its Trailblazer Community, which accelerates this learning through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and support, empower anyone to learn digital skills for the growing Salesforce economy.

How Salesforce is creating jobs to fuel the Salesforce Economy

Salesforce has a number of programs and initiatives to help create the jobs of the future—and to fill them with well-equipped candidates:         

• The Trailblazer Community is a global network of millions of people who help each other learn new skills and succeed with Salesforce. The Trailblazer Community offers an online platform to connect from anywhere, as well as more than 1,300 active regional and interest-based groups around the world. Members share their guidance and expertise and support each other as they build careers and companies with Salesforce. To date, 3 in 5 Trailblazers credit their participation in the Trailblazer Community with helping them get a new job or promotion.
• Trailhead has empowered more than 3.6 million people globally to learn in-demand skills for the future of work. With Trailhead, learners can skill up for free from anywhere and earn globally-recognized credentials for careers in the Salesforce ecosystem. Trailhead provides guided career paths for Salesforce roles, and is introducing three new roles to create entry points into some of the fastest-growing fields today: Marketer, Sales, and Designer.
• The Salesforce Talent Alliance is an initiative that connects partners to job candidates trained on Salesforce via Trailhead and brings new talent into the fast-growing ecosystem. This year, two Talent Alliance partners are Salesforce’s Partner Innovation Awards recipients for demonstrating excellence in expanding the Salesforce economy by training and hiring new and diverse pipelines of talent:

• Cognizant, in collaboration with Salesforce, the University of Montana and ATG, a Cognizant Company built a 12-week paid Salesforce training program called Aim Higher, which has developed more than 175 new Salesforce credentialed consultants in the past two years.

• Bucher + Suter is a Salesforce ISV partner that champions and is a sponsor of Noser Young, which is a leading IT Trainer in Switzerland. Through the Noser Young partnership, Bucher + Suter takes on apprentices every year to help with their education in IT.

What is the Salesforce Economy?
IDC defines “The Salesforce Economy” as the footprint of Salesforce and its partner ecosystem on the economy at large. This includes the revenues and jobs directly generated in the Salesforce customer base from the use of Salesforce and its partners cloud services, as well as jobs created indirectly in the economy by local spending by direct employees and Salesforce and its partners themselves.

Salesforce’s multi-faceted partner ecosystem is a driving force behind the Salesforce Economy’s massive growth and includes:

• The Salesforce partner ecosystem can help customers grow faster. Throughout a customer’s journey, partners fill technology whitespace and offer solutions across products, industries, and regions. The Salesforce partner ecosystem includes consulting partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), and resellers that bring the power of apps and expertise to solve any customer challenges.
• Launched in 2006, Salesforce AppExchange is the world’s largest enterprise cloud marketplace, with over 6,700 partner listings and more than 9 million installs.

Additional Resources

• Download a full copy of the IDC White Paper, “The Salesforce Economic Impact“.
• Explore data from the IDC White Paper in Tableau.
• Hear more about the impact of the Salesforce Economy in this Newsroom Q&A.
• Learn more about the 2021 Partner Innovation Awards here.
• Learn more about Salesforce’s partner ecosystem here.
• Visit the Salesforce AppExchange: http://www.appexchange.com
• Visit Trailhead: https://trailhead.com/
• Follow @salesforce on Twitter

IDC Methodology

The Salesforce Economic Impact Model is an extension to IDC’s IT Economic Impact Model. It estimates Salesforce’s current and future share of the benefits to the general economy generated by cloud computing, and it also estimates the size of the ecosystem supporting Salesforce using IDC’s market research on the ratio of spending on professional services to cloud subscriptions; the ratio of sales of hardware, software, and networking to spending on public and private cloud computing; and the ratio of spending on application development tools to applications developed. Note that the ecosystem may include companies that are not formal business partners of Salesforce but that nevertheless sell products or services associated with the Salesforce implementations. IDC White Paper, sponsored by Salesforce, “The Salesforce Economic Impact,” doc #US48214821, September 20, 2021

¹IDC’s WW Spending Guide on Digital Transformation, 2021

²The Impact of Digital Transformation During Times of Change, July 2020

³IDC Press Release, Cloud Computing Could Eliminate a Billion Metric Tons of CO2 Emission Over the Next Four Years, and Possibly More, According to a New IDC Forecast, March 2021