Appirio In The News

10 More Hot Products From Interop 2012

2012-05-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

CRN

Cloud provider Appirio introduced new features for its CloudFactor application, which is a part of its Cloud Enablement Suite of applications, analytics and a crowdsourcing community for managing enterprise cloud initiatives.

CloudFactor brings Salesforce.com information into Google Apps and allows users to access Salesforce CRM information in Gmail. CloudFactor was first introduced in 2010 as CloudWorks.

CloudFactor allows users to access and manage relevant customer information to improve data quality and decision making. The application supports Group and Professional Edition Salesforce tenants and is available to install via the Salesforce AppExchange and Google Apps Marketplace.

The CloudFactor upgrades include Salesforce.com Chatter integration, an embedded Twitter search widget, and customization and administration options.

6 Tools to Build a Mobile App on the Cheap

2012-05-09T13:23:00.001-07:00

Mashable

Dave Messinger, chief architect of CloudSpokes, says his company is "the first developer community that matches the cloud with the crowd — a true market where businesses tap into skills and pay for results versus effort, and where developers get access to a new world of opportunity to earn money for cloud development.”

The service, built by cloud solutions brand Appirio, allows companies to outsource any form of public cloud development work — entire mobile applications, Facebook pages and technical components for enterprises — in the form of a competition. After customers post a deadline alongside technical specifications, developers in the community submit entries, which are then judged by the customer or the CloudSpokes team.

“For developers, this approach creates a market for their talents, lets them develop new skills with real world assignments and transitions their careers to the cloud while establishing street cred as skilled practitioners,” Messinger says. “For companies (including Appirio), this means tapping into a developer ecosystem and paying only for the components of work that meet pre-agreed upon requirements.”

The success of CloudSpokes reflects the effectiveness an entirely unique approach to app development: A gamified network of freelance contributors. Current challenges range from the bizarre — a Python-based app that can create a route guiding users to every train station on a given system within 24 hours — to the highly practical, including an app to facilitate financial aid application processes by extracting information from existing tax files. (Original Article)

These Newly Funded Start-Ups Are Hiring

2012-04-23T09:32:00.001-07:00

The Wall Street Journal

...After six years in business with a staff of 500, it’s questionable whether Appirio is still a start-up, but after raising $60 million in March it’s got a lot of job openings. The San Mateo, Calif., company is hiring 200 this year as it cashes in on what it calls the “cloud [computing] gold rush.” Appirio helps companies plan their cloud strategies and migrate onto remote servers. It’ll be hiring engineers with cloud experience, quality assurance engineers and architects. Administrative jobs in finance, human resources and corporate development are also available...

Appirio to Hire 200 New Employees for Cloud Biz

2012-04-13T11:09:00.001-07:00

FINS

Cloud computing consultancy Appirio plans to hire 200 new employees this year after raising $60 million in venture capital financing last month. The funding round was led by General Atlantic. Founded in 2006, the company currently has about 500 employees.

Appirio sees itself as displacing consulting companies as businesses increasingly move their operations into the cloud. The company helps businesses identify a cloud strategy, move data into the cloud, develop custom cloud applications and provide cloud management services.

"In the cloud gold rush, we're the picks and shovels," said Chief Executive Chris Barbin...

SAP database and mobility strategies: genius or madness?

2012-04-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

ZDNet

...What I do know is that the new breed of SI like Appirio is able to deliver value based custom apps in the $100,000 range and is now working towards making that model repeatable as a service:

What Appirio has mastered is the automation of professional services using today’s global networked connections — part of a trend I call frictionless enterprise. It’s not just a matter of automating repeatable processes within the service model (though that’s a helpful starting point). It’s also breaking them down into more readily assembled components so that some can be productized or cloudsourced, as appropriate.

I don’t see evidence that SAP or its large SI partners have truly understood this model. Instead, I continue to see legal roadblocks that prevent developers from gaining easy and affordable platform access...

Diabetes Foundation Takes to the Cloud for More Donor Revenues

2012-04-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal

...Szmak said this software is much more intuitive, providing employees with dashboard views of customer’s past fundraising activities and preferences. The software also helps donors choose the information they want to receive at a time when software used by some non-profits spam donors with poorly targeted e-mails about fundraising activities.

This will help better serve existing and potential supporters, eventually enabling the agency to increase the money it’s able to spend on research to find a cure, develop treatments and prevent type-1 diabetes, he said. Salesforce.com also provides mobile support the previous application lacked.

Szmak and his small IT staff lacked the technical wherewithal to move the data created in file formats from their older application to Salesforce.com. So the foundation hired Appirio, a cloud service provider that capitalizes on data integration challenges...

3 Ways APIs are Changing IT Consulting

2012-04-02T10:49:00.002-07:00

Silicon ANGLE

...Dave Messinger, chief architect and evangelist for CloudSpokes at Appirio, agrees with Pisoni and points out that most “custom” solutions that customers build are really not as custom as they’d like to think. “In software development, code re-use is a holy grail,” he says. “APIs take this to a whole new level.” SIs are now turning to integration-as-a-service providers like e SnapLogic, Talend and Informatica to make integration go quicker and easier...

A how-to guide for Web APIs

2012-03-26T10:06:00.001-07:00

SD Times

...Narinder Singh, cofounder of Appirio and CloudSpokes, said there are more hard-and-fast rules regarding APIs than just not changing them. CloudSpokes is a site where developers collect bounties on application requirements. Companies put up requests, typically along the lines of “use Google Maps' API and our Salesforce application to make maps of deliveries.” Due to the nature of modern Web development, almost every CloudSpokes solution uses at least a few Web APIs.

With all those developers building with Web APIs, Singh has seen what it takes to make a successful API. “[Cloud VOIP service] Twilio has done a good job with their API,” he said. “How do I know? Because every time we run a contest on CloudSpokes that has requirements like 'Pick two things and mash them up,' Twilio shows up a disproportionate number of times, even when the use case doesn't quite fit.”

For its Valentine’s Day contest, CloudSpokes asked developers to build applications that could get them a date. Three of the five final entries used Twilio. One of those applications, said Singh, automatically found potential suitors via dating sites, then connected the possible couple via VOIP using Twilio...

Appirio masters the automation of professional services

2012-03-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

ZDNet

By now, we’re used to enterprise cloud application vendors paving their IPO roadmap with mega funding announcements, but last week saw the first such news for an enterprise cloud integrator. Appirio’s $60 million Series D round mostly from General Atlantic is a different order of funding from its previous total of $20 million. It’s especially notable in the context of my suggestion a week earlier that we might see “the virtual extinction of the traditional systems integrator” as the new breed of cloud integrators “scale up their own more customizable automation to address the high-end enterprise market.” Or as the Forbes headline more bluntly expressed it, Appirio Raises $60M to Take on Accenture...

Appirio Rises As Businesses Gaze Into The Cloud

2012-03-15T12:27:00.001-07:00

The Wall Street Journal

...Appirio will face competition from big systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte Development LLC that are several times its size, but Barbin believes that his company’s experience and its intellectual property give it a head start.

His team has done deployments of Salesforce.com, Google, Amazon.com and Workday software, among others, and will continue to add other specialties, possibly including Service-now.com, which offers software for IT management. Barbin said he gets eight to 10 requests a week from potential partners wanting Appirio to set up a practice around their software.

Appirio has offices in Japan, India, Singapore and the U.K., which it entered in September through the acquisition of Saaspoint, a Salesforce and Google partner, and expects to make more acquisitions...

Appirio Raises $60M to Take on Accenture

2012-03-15T12:25:00.001-07:00

Forbes

...this is the opportunity for Appirio, whose mission includes helping customers get the maximum value from cloud implementations.

But Appirio is not just a group of high-paid consultants. The company actually has some innovative systems, such as CloudSpokes — a community of more than 35,000 developers who submit their solutions, then are awarded prizes by a panel of judges.

“One of our clients ran a contest to implement complex timezone calculations in their Salesforce application that would have cost several thousand dollars for a traditional systems integrator to do,” Appirio CEO Chris Barbin said. “But with CloudSpokes, we got multiple working solutions for just $750 in prize money.”..

Appirio founder on cloud-services firm's latest funding round -- and Chicago as a startup hub

2012-03-15T00:37:00.001-07:00

Crain's Chicago Business

Appirio Inc., which offers technology and professional services to companies' cloud applications, today announced a $60 million investment led by General Atlantic, with participation from Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital.

Appirio is based in San Mateo, Calif., but the company's chief executive, Chris Barbin, spends at least a third of his time in Chicago, where he calls Glenview home.

Mr. Barbin, 41, who early in his career worked for Lake Forest-based W.W. Grainger Inc., says the latest round of funding is the largest of its kind in a cloud services provider and will allow Appirio not only to continue developing its crowdsourcing development platform, CloudSpokes, but also will enable the company to snap up other consulting firms...

Appirio raises $60M to be your one-stop cloud service shop

2012-03-15T00:30:00.001-07:00

VentureBeat

...“We are seeing more companies going cloud first, saying they’re not ever going to buy another server,” said Chris Barbin, Appirio chief executive, “We’re also seeing companies making the migration to 100% cloud to reduce costs and help them scale faster.”

The five-year-old company started out helping big companies adopt cloud services such as Google Apps, Salesforce, and Workday. It then turned its attention to cloud app development, creating apps that tie together multiple cloud services and social networks. For example, it developed an app that integrates Google Calendar and contacts with Salesforce calendar and contact lists.

Appirio’s current offerings run the gamut of cloud services. The company will help you decide which cloud service is right for your company, build custom apps to work with the cloud, move your data to the cloud, and manage the cloud services it’s set up for your business. Essentially, it hopes to move your business away from in-house IT departments and run it solely in the cloud...

New-look integrator Appirio raises $60M

2012-03-15T00:29:00.001-07:00

GigaOM

...The company built its business by diving into the then-relatively new world of software as a service, helping companies deploy and customize services from Salesforce.com and Google and ensuring that they worked with customers’ older legacy software.

Appirio Chief Strategy Officer Narinder Singh said the company’s revenue has grown 80 percent every year since it was founded almost six years ago, but would not comment on profitability...

Appirio: Cloud Makes Global Systems Integrators Obsolete

2012-03-15T00:24:00.004-07:00

SiliconANGLE

...Narinder Singh, co-founder of cloud integrator Appirio, reached out directly to CIOs in a blog entry today to explain in no uncertain terms just how critical the global cloud system integrator model is to the future of IT – and just how painfully obsolete the existing global systems integrator business has become.

“After the first World War, the French constructed the Maginot Line - a set of fortifications, tanks obstacles and other fixed positions to defend the country. It was ‘extolled as a work of genius‘ up until the point of World War II, when it became clear that armies were structurally more mobile and agile than ever before. The Maginot Line was essentially driven around and France was successfully invaded in just a few days. The global systems integrator model is the Maginot Line of the cloud world,” writes Singh...

Cloud-consulting company Appirio wins $60 million

2012-03-15T00:23:00.001-07:00

Reuters

Cloud-consulting company Appirio said it raised $60 million, in a round of funding led by General Atlantic, that will allow it to buy other companies and build out its development platform, CloudSpokes.

The funding, from General Atlantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital, underscores the venture's continuing belief in the cloud, which allows businesses to buy computing resources such as software applications and data management much as they buy utilities. Previously, companies typically maintained their own computing infrastructure.

Appirio helps companies such as Avon, Motorola and Starbucks move to cloud-based services offered by companies including Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Workday...

Appirio Receives $60 Million In VC Funding, Plans More Acquisitions

2012-03-15T00:14:00.002-07:00

CRN

Cloud provider Appirio said it has received $60 million in venture funding, much of which it plans to use for mergers and acquisitions to bolster its worldwide cloud consulting practice.

The funding, one the largest of its kind according to Appirio, will also be invested in its technologies and in its CloudSpokes crowdsourcing developer community, which has more than 30,000 developers in more than 65 countries.

The Series D funding is being provided by the investment firm General Atlantic, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital, Appirio said...

Appirio: Cloud Makes Global Systems Integrators Obsolete

2012-03-13T16:49:00.002-07:00

SiliconANGLE

Narinder Singh, co-founder of cloud integrator Appirio, reached out directly to CIOs in a blog entry today to explain in no uncertain terms just how critical the global cloud system integrator model is to the future of IT – and just how painfully obsolete the existing global systems integrator business has become.

“After the first World War, the French constructed the Maginot Line - a set of fortifications, tanks obstacles and other fixed positions to defend the country. It was ‘extolled as a work of genius‘ up until the point of World War II, when it became clear that armies were structurally more mobile and agile than ever before. The Maginot Line was essentially driven around and France was successfully invaded in just a few days. The global systems integrator model is the Maginot Line of the cloud world,” writes Singh...

Cloud Software Use Accelerates, Says Citi

2012-03-07T21:22:00.000-08:00

Barron's

Citigroup‘s Walter Pritchard today writes that the software-as-a-service, or SaaS, market for enterprise applications has arrived at a “ripping point,” by which he means that the practice of ripping out older software and replacing it with cloud-based, hosted applications, appears to be accelerating.

Based on a conversation with Appirio, a San Mateo, California systems integrator for SaaS, Pritchard observed there is a hefty amount of removal being done of older enterprise resource planning, or “ERP,” applications...

Next-gen integrators automate how you buy IT

2012-03-07T13:19:00.000-08:00

ZDNet

...There’s still a demand from larger customers for sophisticated custom capabilities, but the new generation of providers such as Cloud Sherpas, Appirio and others offer that custom service on top of a bedrock of highly automated processes. As CEO of the newly enlarged Cloud Sherpas David Northington confirmed to me this week, “Work can be carried out offsite, in many ways automated. There’s clearly an industrialized approach that works in many segments of the market and people are quite happy with that.”..

How to build a developer community from scratch

2012-02-29T08:00:00.000-08:00

VentureBeat

Whether you’re a company in need of development work, or someone with an open source project that needs contributions, leveraging a developer community can seem like a simple and cost-effective solution.

The promise of having hundreds or even thousands of independent, talented workers solving your development problems around the clock appears to be a dream come true.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that easily. You can’t add the word “developer” to your website and expect hundreds of developers to suddenly support your initiatives and grow organically.

Developer communities are called communities for a reason — they are beneficial to everyone involved and take a lot of work to both grow and maintain. Work that includes time, transparency, and in some cases, significant funding...

Gmail Integration Battle - Cirrus Insight vs Appirio Cloudworks

2012-01-17T12:50:00.000-08:00

Trineo

...It’s great to see these products that customers have been craving finally come to market. It’s a shame that Salesforce.com didn’t build an official integration like this a long time ago.

After using the 2 products side by side (literally with Cirrus Insight to the right of an email and Cloudworks underneath) I’d give the slight edge to Cloudworks at this time. They are both very good products but Cloudworks is slightly cheaper and offers a little bit more functionality.

No longer can it be an excuse that it’s too hard to keep the CRM up to date!

Cloud service broker Appirio: Focus on fewer partners, avoid the hype

2012-01-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

SearchCloudProvider

Editor's note: If there's any concrete evidence of how cloud computing is changing the channel, it might be the emergence of a new species of channel partner, the cloud service broker -- part consultant, part integrator and all cloud.

Glenn Weinstein, CTO of cloud service broker Appirio, shared his vision for 2012 in the third of our four-part Q&A series on cloud provider strategy for the year ahead. Appirio -- which partners with Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Workday -- is on a mission to expose what it sees as the market's biggest liability: cloud washers. The cloud service broker's tongue-in-cheek awards ceremony, the Cloud Washies, modeled after Hollywood's unofficial "Razzies" (honoring the worst movies of the year), took aim at Oracle and Microsoft as some of the worst offenders.

It's unclear what marketing tricks Appirio has up its sleeve for 2012, but Weinstein told SearchCloudProvider.com that its business and technical strategy as a cloud broker is well-defined: Go global and go enterprise...

How Appirio can help transform your sales and business process

2012-01-05T14:44:00.000-08:00

WWWireframe.com

Despite the countless advantages cloud computing offers to enterprises, adoption has been steady yet slow. Now one company in San Mateo is changing all that.

Appirio, founded in 2006 by Chris Barbin, Narinder Singh, Glenn Weinstein, and Mike O’Brien, offers a full range of cloud computing services that is helping businesses make the transition to cloud computing easier, faster and in a more cost-effective way. Apart from offering a predefined set of solutions and services — they’re also working on innovation in cloud integration, mobile cloud and social enterprise. And here’s the best part, they do all this serious work while still maintaining a very healthy sense of humor.

5 Worst Cloud Washers Of 2011

2011-12-13T08:58:00.000-08:00

InformationWeek

...That means that "cloud computing" is a new way of doing things that hasn't shaken down into a strict definition--it's still a moving target. At the same time, it's only fair to say that some vendors are exploiting that opening and cloud washing their products.

On Wednesday, Dec. 14, cloud consulting company Appirio will host the Cloudwashies—an "awards" event similar to the Razzies awards for bad movies. I've got my own list of nominees for top cloud washers--those parties who have done the most to try to make a previous generation product look and sound like cloud...