Capgemini Consulting, a global strategy and transformation consulting firm, and Badgeville, a fast growing startup focused on gamification of enterprise applications, last week announced a partnership to accelerate the use of gamification techniques to enable enterprises to motivate employees and customers.

This partnership seems like a win-win solution for both parties. Enterprise operations have seen multiple waves of innovation in recent years. Functions such as CRM and HCM first started migrating to the cloud, followed by proliferation of mobility into the enterprise. More recently, companies such as Yammer, Jive and Dropbox have brought social and collaboration, and in doing so have blurred the distinction between consumer and enterprise. All in all, now we are seeing increasingly dispersed enterprise teams using cloud-hosted software and communicating pre-dominantly through online means. As such, gamification represents the logical next step as enterprises work to keep their distributed workforce engaged and motivated, providing startups like Badgeville with an excellent selling proposition to such enterprises. What Badgeville and others lack is a strong distribution channel, and firms such as Capgemini which do thousands of customer engagements every year and which are looking for means to participate, can provide exactly what Badgeville needs.

So what’s the long term game for this trend towards consumerization of the enterprise? Could BYOD eventually result in enterprises becoming just collections of individuals? Maybe, and by the time that happens, Badgeville and/or its likes will have become entrenched enterprise players. IT consulting firms will probably have another inflection point at that time, and may need to transition into part-consultants and part-product-players. Until then, partnerships such as Badgeville – Capgemini will be very beneficial for enterprises and consumers alike.