ATLANTA, GA, Cloud Sherpas, recently named the Google Enterprise 2011 Partner of the Year, has merged with GlobalOne, a salesforce.com platinum consulting partner. The new company, to be called Cloud Sherpas, has also received a $20 million investment from Columbia Capital, which last year invested $15M in GlobalOne.

David Northington, who was CEO at GlobalOne and previously was COO of CapGemini's North American Applications Services group, will be CEO of Cloud Sherpas. Former Cloud Sherpas CEO Douglas Shepard will be president of Cloud Sherpas' Google business unit.

The investment from Columbia Capital, a prominent enterprise-focused venture capital firm with over $2.5 billion under management, will be used by Cloud Sherpas to solidify its position as a leader in the Cloud Service Provider market (CSP). The funds will allow Cloud Sherpas to extend its reach into new geographic regions, further development of vertical market solutions, and continue to expand its portfolio of cloud-based applications that unify cloud interoperability.

"Both GlobalOne and Cloud Sherpas were born in the cloud as pure-play cloud service providers," said Northington. "The combined firm further enables our singular mission-to help customers transform their businesses by leveraging the power of the cloud. The new Cloud Sherpas has the talent, domain expertise and geographic reach to help businesses improve IT agility and lower costs through a series of cloud consulting, integration and support services."

Founded in 2008, Cloud Sherpas was among the first Google Enterprise partners devoted to Google Apps. In less than four years, the company has transformed the IT foundation of businesses, governments, organizations and educational institutions large and small, by replacing legacy, on-premise email systems with messaging, collaboration and security solutions in the cloud. The company was recently named the Google Enterprise 2011 Partner of the Year, based in part on their deep-rooted commitment to Google technologies and customer success, as evidenced by the number of Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialists throughout its organization.

"The CSP business model is different than traditional professional services," said Jon Hallett, Chairman of Cloud Sherpas. "The merger broadens our capabilities, enabling us to help our customers capture the benefits of continual technology innovation provided in the cloud. Partnered with a CSP like Cloud Sherpas, customers can make incremental bets over time to consistently align technology to their business, reduce risk and deliver significantly higher value."

Meanwhile, GlobalOne, which started in 2007, has been a fast growing salesforce.com consulting partner. Based in New York with offices throughout the U.S. and Asia, GlobalOne has helped hundreds of enterprise clients deploy and realize tremendous value from salesforce.com. As one of the companies on the salesforce.com International Technical Architecture Review Board, GlobalOne is highly-respected for its CRM expertise and well-known for its vertical solutions.

In addition, GlobalOne has developed an offshore delivery center based in the Philippines and recently acquired a mobile app development team from Vodafone. These teams have helped transform how customers interact with technology at their organizations. Leveraging the power of the Salesforce platform, the GlobalOne team has built custom applications and award-winning social and mobile apps for businesses around the globe.

Douglas Shepard, president of Cloud Sherpas, says, "Bringing together a dominant salesforce.com partner with a leading Google Enterprise partner enables us to provide customers around the globe with a more comprehensive range of enterprise cloud solutions."

"The demand for cloud services in Asia-Pacific continues to grow at breakneck speed," added John Orrock, founder of GlobalOne and senior vice president for Asia-Pacific, at Cloud Sherpas. "Our cloud consultants in Australia and New Zealand, combined with our newly acquired mobility practice and offshore development capabilities in the Philippines, sets the new Cloud Sherpas apart from other cloud service providers in the region."

All other founders and senior managers from GlobalOne and Cloud Sherpas will remain with the new organization.

To follow updates and news on the merger, follow the hashtag #NextAltitude on twitter.

About Cloud Sherpas

Cloud Sherpas, recently named both the Google Enterprise 2011 Partner of the Year and a Platinum salesforce.com Partner, is a leading enterprise-focused Cloud Service Provider, helping organizations leverage the cloud to rapidly innovate while also dramatically reducing IT expenses. A top Google Enterprise and salesforce.com partner, Cloud Sherpas has migrated over 1.5 million users across a variety of industries from legacy, on-premise systems to the cloud. Cloud Sherpas enables mid-size and large enterprises to transition easily into the cloud with CRM, social business services, custom and mobile application development, and managed services. Cloud Sherpas has offices in Atlanta, Brisbane, Chicago, Manila, New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Wellington. For more information visit www.cloudsherpas.com.