IDC: Salesforce-related economic activity will create 271,000 UK jobs and £52bn in sales by 2026

An IDC study, sponsored by Salesforce, has predicted that the cloud-based sales and marketing software supplier and its “ecosystem” of partners in the UK will create 271,700 jobs and £52bn in new business revenues by 2026.

The study also asserted that the UK Salesforce partner network would make £4.59 for every £1 Salesforce makes in the UK by 2026.

More generally, The Salesforce economic impact whitepaper, published on the eve of the Dreamforce 2021 conference, forecast that cloud-related technologies would account for 28% of digital transformation IT spending this year in western Europe, growing to 39% in 2026.

In the paper, IDC described “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 from local spending by direct employees and Salesforce and its partners themselves.

IDC predicted that the use of Salesforce and its partners’ cloud services in the UK would generate £10.25bn this year and more than double that in 2026, reaching £22.96bn. Partners are generating five times as much revenue as the supplier itself, according to IDC, and that will climb to six times in 2026.

To estimate the Salesforce ecosystem, IDC started with Salesforce revenues by country by year, based on IDC tracker data for cloud software and professional services revenues by supplier. Those, alongside Wall Street estimates and Salesforce financials, were used to forecast past revenue and revenue a year out. The outer-year forecasts project Salesforce revenues at the forecast growth rate of the various software sub-markets in which IDC tracks Salesforce.

In another study, also adduced in the pre-Dreamforce Salesforce release, IDC surveyed 525 companies in eight countries about cloud deployment. In the UK, of the 75% of survey respondents whose organisations have a formal digital transformation strategy, 95% said cloud computing was important to that strategy.

The international survey also found that Salesforce technology has enabled 44% of customer respondents to expand their workforce to more suburban and rural areas, and 22% to expand their workforce to new population groups, such as stay-at-home parents and people with disabilities.

In related IDC research, Worldwide CO2 emissions savings from cloud computing forecast, 2021-2024: A first-of-its-kind projection, the analyst firm forecast that from 2021 to 2024, global migration from on-premise software to the cloud could reduce as much as one billion metric tons of CO2.

Salesforce 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. It added that IDC’s customer survey found that 33% of Salesforce customers surveyed in the UK look to the supplier as a source of support in reaching their own sustainability objectives.