A consultancy from a Florida beach town that helps organizations do more with Salesforce, data, and AI - and became one of TCS's largest-ever acquisitions.
Coastal Cloud's wordmark, photographed against the deep navy the firm favors in its own decks. From a Palm Coast garage-era start in 2012 to a $700 million exit in 2025 - the logo of a company that grew up quietly on the coast.
Coastal Cloud sells a deceptively simple promise: buy Salesforce, and it will help you get your money's worth. That is harder than it sounds. Enterprise software is bought in a burst of optimism and then lived with for years, and the gap between the demo and the daily reality is where consultancies like Coastal make their living. Founded in 2012 in Palm Coast, Florida - a beach town better known for golf than for cloud computing - the firm has built its business inside the Salesforce ecosystem, layering in data platforms like Snowflake, analytics through Tableau, and integration via MuleSoft.
The work runs across the full arc of a platform's life: strategy and roadmapping up front, implementation and integration in the middle, and managed services once the system is live. Coastal describes its approach as automation-first, aimed at measurable business results with reduced risk. In practice that means the firm is hired to design a Salesforce environment, connect it to the rest of a company's systems, move and modernize the underlying data, and then keep the whole thing running and improving.
By its own count, Coastal has completed more than 8,000 projects for over 1,700 organizations, backed by thousands of Salesforce certifications across its team. Those certification numbers are not a vanity metric. In a partner ecosystem where Salesforce itself decides who gets ranked and referred, credentialed depth is the currency, and Coastal has spent years accumulating it.
Coastal works with mid-market and enterprise organizations, nonprofits, and public-sector agencies. The common thread is not an industry - it is a platform.
The client roster reads like a deliberate argument for range. Duke Energy and ADT sit alongside Columbia University, Hartford HealthCare, Blue Cross Blue Shield, RE/MAX, Valvoline, and the Wounded Warrior Project. What binds a utility, a university, an insurer, and a veterans' charity together is that each runs on Salesforce and each needs it to do something specific and hard.
The problems Coastal is hired to solve tend to fall into a few buckets: sales and service processes that do not match how the business actually works, customer data scattered across disconnected systems, marketing that cannot prove its impact, and platforms that were implemented years ago and have since drifted out of step with the organization. The firm cites outcomes like tens of millions in recovered revenue, service response times cut sharply, and marketing conversion rates that climbed - the kind of numbers that justify a consulting invoice.
Coastal's offerings map to the lifecycle of a platform - advise, build, connect, modernize, and maintain.
The "True North" advisory practice aligns Salesforce and data investments with business goals and roadmaps.
Multi-cloud Salesforce builds across Sales, Service, Marketing, Revenue/CPQ, and Commerce, plus MuleSoft integration.
Data Cloud, Snowflake, and analytics engineering to modernize data foundations and enable AI.
Agentforce and AI-led advisory to build agentic customer experiences on the Salesforce platform.
Tableau and CRM Analytics dashboards, reporting, and data visualization.
Ongoing administration, optimization, and support for deployed Salesforce environments.
The Salesforce consulting market is crowded and top-heavy. At the summit sit the global integrators - Accenture, Deloitte Digital, Cognizant - and the specialist mid-tier - Slalom, Silverline, Perficient, Traction on Demand. Coastal's answer to that competition was not to be bigger. It was to be deeply, verifiably credentialed and to prove it through Salesforce's own recognition programs.
That strategy shows in the trophies: the Salesforce Customer Success Partner Innovation Award three years running, a market-leader ranking from ISG for five consecutive years, and 5-star ratings on the AppExchange and G2 built on hundreds of reviews. Coastal also leaned into culture as a retention tool - repeatedly landing on Inc.'s Best Workplaces list, remote-first before it was common - because in a certification business, keeping your certified people is the product.
When Salesforce pivoted toward Data Cloud and Agentforce, Coastal did not have to reinvent itself. The data and AI muscle it had been building since 2020 was exactly what the new era demanded - which is a large part of why TCS was willing to pay $700 million for it.
We exist to make you successful.- Coastal Cloud's stated mission
A former leader in Accenture's technology practice who set out to build a different kind of IT consulting firm. Named among Inc.'s Top 200 Female Founders.
More than 25 years of consulting experience, including 21 years as an Accenture partner. Co-built Coastal with his wife, Sara.
Co-founder and former CEO of Bluewolf (acquired by IBM) and a former Salesforce Chief Commercial Officer. Joined Coastal's board in 2021, took the CEO seat in 2023.
Former Accenture leaders Sara and Tim Hale launch a Salesforce-focused consultancy on Florida's coast.
The firm broadens across Salesforce clouds and adds analytics capabilities.
Sverica Capital Management backs Coastal Cloud in June 2020 to accelerate growth.
The Bluewolf co-founder is named to Coastal Cloud's Board of Managers.
The 23-year Salesforce veteran takes the CEO seat at Dreamforce 2023.
Coastal doubles down on Data Cloud, AI-led advisory, and agentic solutions.
Tata Consultancy Services agrees to acquire Coastal Cloud in an all-cash deal announced in December.
Coastal makes money the way consultancies do: project fees for implementation and integration, advisory engagements up front, and recurring managed-services contracts once systems are live. The recurring layer matters - it turns one-time build work into a longer relationship and smooths the lumpiness of project-based revenue. Reported figures put annual revenue around $141 million, with third-party estimates of roughly $83 million in recurring revenue.
In the market, Coastal occupies the specialist tier - large enough to take on enterprise transformations, focused enough to stay deep in Salesforce rather than spreading across every platform. That position is exactly what made it an acquisition target. For TCS, buying Coastal added hundreds of certified professionals and a book of Salesforce advisory work that would have taken years to build internally.
Headquartered in Palm Coast, Florida - a beach city better known for golf than cloud computing.
Run for years by husband-and-wife Sara and Tim Hale, both former Accenture leaders.
Distributed long before the pandemic made it standard across consulting.
It is a consulting firm that helps organizations implement, integrate, and get value from Salesforce, along with data and AI platforms like Snowflake, Tableau, and MuleSoft. Services span strategy, implementation, analytics, and managed support.
It was founded in 2012 by Sara Stanley Hale and Tim Hale, both former Accenture leaders, and is headquartered in Palm Coast, Florida.
Eric Berridge, co-founder and former CEO of Bluewolf and a former Salesforce Chief Commercial Officer, was appointed CEO in September 2023.
Yes. Tata Consultancy Services announced a definitive agreement in December 2025 to acquire 100% of Coastal Cloud for $700 million in an all-cash deal, with completion expected in late January 2026.
Healthcare, financial services, education, nonprofit, manufacturing, high tech, private equity, and the public sector, among others.