Exclusive: Yammer Now Works With Salesforce.com

All Things D

...Today, Yammer will announce that it will work with another application, and it’s a big one: Salesforce.com. The folks at Yammer used Force.com — Salesforce’s development platform — and Yammer’s own API to grab activity stream data from within Salesforce. Sales leads, deals, marketing campaigns and all sorts of other activity that gets entered into Salesforce.com become objects that can appear directly within a Yammer stream, which is essentially as easy to keep track of and interact with as a Facebook stream.

In fact, a Facebook stream is exactly what Yammer CEO David Sacks compares it to. “A few months ago we released an activity stream API that lets any application push activity stories into Yammer, the same way that Zynga can push items like the latest Mafia Wars score into your Facebook stream,” he says.

Yammer did the integration with help from Appirio, a cloud apps developer that gets tapped to do a lot of third-party integration work...

Why Do Clients Choose One Cloud Vendor Over Another?

Datamation

...for businesses looking to make the jump to a cloud deployment, it's not always that easy to get into the game. Even once an organization has made the decision to head to the cloud and selected their environment -- neither a matter of just checking boxes! -- a host of challenges concerning security, data migration and project management await.

So it's no surprise that the niche sector of cloud solution providers -- those companies that can help shepherd IT departments through the transition -- has become a growth industry.

One that comes highly recommended – by Google, in this case – is the San Mateo, Calif.-based Appirio, founded in 2006. In the time since, Appirio has helped more than 200 enterprises and other organizations on their path to the cloud, offering a services portfolio that encompasses the implementation and management of deployments on Salesforce, Google, Workday and Amazon...

Workday launches Workday 14, wins Thomson Reuters deal

ZDNet

...Thomson Reuters, which has more than 55,000 employees in 100 countries, will use Workday's human capital management (HCM) and payroll tools. Workday started targeting companies with 1,000 employees and up, but is increasingly talking to larger enterprises with an average of 8,000 workers.

The news comes as Workday increasingly gains momentum. Appirio CEO Chris Barbin recently said that Workday has momentum in many accounts, but primarily for HCM. Barbin, however, expects Workday to get traction in financial tools at some point....

Next-Generation IT: Why We Need A Cloud Middleman

Forbes

The Internet has removed the middleman in many ways. It's a natural tool for disintermediation, allowing passengers to book their own plane tickets, readers to create their own clipping services or candidates to find their own job openings. But just as public cloud computing has brought the power of the Internet to large businesses, it has also created the need for a new type of middleman -- what Gartner has called a cloud services brokerage...

The 2011 CRM Market Leaders

destinationCRM.com

...Cloud centricity is hot right now, and analysts predict the temperature will soon rise for Salesforce.com-partnered firm Appirio. Wang praised the company for its "capability to move in fast and impact results." The low cost of Appirio's services make it a solid choice for companies of any size. "There's a lot of people going after the GEs of the world," Kaplan explains, "but there's not many going after the midmarket." And that's where he sees Appirio making its mark. With cash and quickness looming larger than ever, big companies would be well advised to keep their eyes on this smaller upstart...

Hiring Like It's 1999

Bloomberg Businessweek

...Recruiting tactics from the late 1990s are starting to make a comeback, too. Last year, Appirio hired a taco truck and parked it at Dreamforce, an industry conference for cloud computing professionals. Attendees couldn’t help but notice the signs on the truck saying that Appirio was hiring as they waited in line for free tacos.

When Dreamforce happens again later this month, Appirio plans to ply attendees with more food, but the company wouldn’t divulge exactly what it plans to serve. Appirio anticipates that about 25,000 people will attend Dreamforce, the cloud computing trade show organized by Salesforce.com (CRM). “We assume that 10 percent are actively looking for a new job,” says Narinder Singh, Appirio’s chief strategy officer. The company hired 110 workers in the first half of this year and is looking for another 140 by year’s end...

Appirio CEO talks Workday, SaaS momentum, IPO

ZDNet

...Appirio is a cloud consulting and services firm on a $100 million annual revenue run rate and a quest to enable the serverless enterprise.

The company is also pondering an initial public offering in the next six to 18 months to continue to fund its rapid growth. We caught up with Appirio CEO Chris Barbin to talk shop and cloud computing...