These Newly Funded Start-Ups Are Hiring

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

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?

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

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

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...