Appirio Raises $60M to Take on Accenture

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.”..