The NRB Group and the Cronos Group, both prime Belgian ICT service providers, have set up a joint venture to sell and support Salesforce solutions. Salesforce is an ecosystem of cloud software for customer relationship management (CRM). The new company is called Together Services S.A. It is 50% owned by NRB S.A., and the other 50% is equally divided between two companies of the Cronos Group, namely Oeco Group S.A. and Xplor Group. Olivier Lallemand becomes the Chief Executive Officer of Together Services S.A., in addition to his current job as CEO of Afelio, the NRB Group’s specialist in custom software development.
Salesforce is an integrated CRM platform that gives all business departments — including marketing, sales, commerce, and service — a single, shared view of every customer. The portfolio of Together Services will cover all Salesforce modules, such as Sales, Service, Marketing, MuleSoft and Tableau. It will employ around 15 people from the NRB Group and the Cronos Group. And it is expected to recruit another 10 collaborators in its first year, during which it will generate revenues of around EUR 2 million. Together Services will be based in the centre of Liège.
The NRB Group already had a Salesforce competence centre since 2020, mainly servicing two major clients of NRB: the insurer Ethias and the water distribution company CILE. This competence centre consisted of Afelio and NRB staff working closely with the Cronos group as the preferred technology partner for Salesforce. The Cronos Group has been working with Salesforce since 2009 and has more than 300 Salesforce consultants.
“With the creation of the joint venture Together Services S.A., we are in fact underpinning the collaboration between the NRB Group and the Cronos Group,” confirms Olivier Lallemand, CEO of the new company. “We bring together the specific assets of both organisations: the knowledge and experience with Salesforce of the Cronos staff, and NRB’s expertise not only in particular sectors such as the public & social sector, the financial sector, utilities and industry but also in areas such as digital transformation, cloud management and migrations, and, of course, infrastructure management.”
“Moreover, the action radius of Cronos mainly spans Flanders, while that of NRB is mainly in the French part of the country. Together Services will, in addition to an implementation team, also deploy its own sales team. The latter will work closely with the sales teams of the NRB Group for Wallonia, Brussels, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and France (French-speaking customers) on the one hand and of the Cronos Group for Dutch-speaking customers on the other. Thanks to the network of both companies, we will be able to reach more than 10,000 (potential) customers.”
“The market for Salesforce products is growing rapidly and requires a strong team that can work exclusively with their products,” explains Dirk Deroost, managing director of the Cronos Group. “We wanted to strengthen our market position for all Salesforce solutions while meeting the exclusivity needs of the market and Salesforce. Together, we will form a dedicated and specialised team, with an outspoken agile culture, consisting of local resources who are able to align and work closely with the customers to help him optimise his customer and partner relationships.”
