Salesforce.com Inc. partner Vlocity Inc. is getting another dose of venture capital, raising $60 million in new funding.

The Series C round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, with participation from new investor Bessemer Venture Partners and existing strategic investors Accenture and New York Life. It brings Vlocity’s total capital raised to date to $163 million.

Vlocity sells its products exclusively on the Salesforce App Exchange, and is focused purely on creating industry-specific functionality and processes for its partner’s customer relationship platform.

Vlocity’s value proposition is that it takes care of all of the customization of Salesforce’s underlying platform that companies would otherwise have to do themselves. These customizations include things such as problem handling and workflow and product configuration.

Because Vlocity has done this numerous times within entire industries, it said, it can perform its customizations faster, better and at a lower cost than any company could do on its own. As a result, customers can achieve greater business agility and time-to-value, it said.

The company currently targets five specific industries, including communications and media, insurance and financial services, healthcare, energy and utilities, as well as government and nonprofits.

“As entire industries are being disrupted, Vlocity is leading a trend in cloud software towards industry specialization with a deep product portfolio serving several massive vertical markets,” said Jim White, managing director of Sutter Hill Ventures. “We know founder and CEO David Schmaier from the early days of CRM, and we continue to be impressed with his proven leadership team, focused strategy and strong execution for driving massive value for companies as they go digital in their target industries.”

This trend toward industry specialization is gathering steam because the vast majority of software-as-a-service offerings lack vertical capabilities, said Holger Mueller, a technology analyst with Constellation Research Inc. This is true even with Salesforce.com Inc., which explains its interest in backing Vlocity, he said.

“In the best case it’s smart R&D funding and in the worst case a hedge for Salesforce’s own vertical product development investments,” Mueller said. “[The investment] also means Salesforce keeps CRM veteran Schmaier in its ecosystem. He is a CRM legend from the Siebel days, so it’s better for Salesforce to see him work there than with the competition.”

Vlocity said it plans to use the funding to accelerate its product development and expand its global service and support teams and infrastructure.

Photo: Vlocity/Facebook