ZDNet
With more than 500 enterprise cloud customers to its name, San Francisco-based Appirio is one of the better-known players in the cloud integrator community, even though it only employs about 600 people outright. But co-founder and chief strategy officer Narinder Singh knows he can't compete with legacy integrators like Accenture with his on-staff numbers, which is why his company created the CloudSpokes crowdsourced development platform almost two years ago.
When ZDNet contributor Dennis Howlett chatted with Singh last fall, there were approximately 50,000 developers participating in the community. When I caught up with him two weeks ago, that number had eclipsed 73,000.
If you haven't read ZDNet's past coverage about CloudSpokes, the idea is for enterprises to use the site to help develop specific applications that plug in to broader platforms by running challenges to see what already exists and might be reusable. More than 600 challenges have been completed so far.
"You know somewhere in the world that someone else did something like what you need, maybe even just last week," Singh said.
The original plan was to use CloudSpokes as a supplement to Appirio's own resources, but a healthy development community has built up around several well-known cloud platforms, including Salesforce.com, Box and DocuSign, he said. That visibility reflects positively on Appirio...
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Appirio in the News
Monday, March 25, 2013
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Q&A: General Atlantic's Rochkind explains big bets on Box, Appirio, more
Silicon Valley Business Journal
...Appirio is a business that's been ramping very quickly. They've done some acquisitions. Most recently they bought a company in the East Bay called Knowledge Infusion to expand their practice.
It’s got a great management team with Chris Barbin and Narinder Singh. We only back existing strong managers. We love the guys at Box, too, with Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith and Dan Levin. So that's where it starts.
Then we were able to develop a partnership relationship with them where we could be very helpful to pursue some M&A targets that Appirio wanted to pursue. We were helpful in doing due diligence and in getting those deals done.
In addition we've been very helpful with introducing them to some of those Global 2000 and Fortune 500 companies we work with. So it’s been just a great partnership for a business that this year will do over $100 million in revenue and is growing very quickly, expanding globally wanting to get these large customers. It was a situation where we could invest just over $50 million of capital. So it's just sizeable enough for us to spend our time on. And they really believed in and believe in our value proposition, how we would differentiate from traditional venture capital money...
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...Appirio is a business that's been ramping very quickly. They've done some acquisitions. Most recently they bought a company in the East Bay called Knowledge Infusion to expand their practice.
It’s got a great management team with Chris Barbin and Narinder Singh. We only back existing strong managers. We love the guys at Box, too, with Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith and Dan Levin. So that's where it starts.
Then we were able to develop a partnership relationship with them where we could be very helpful to pursue some M&A targets that Appirio wanted to pursue. We were helpful in doing due diligence and in getting those deals done.
In addition we've been very helpful with introducing them to some of those Global 2000 and Fortune 500 companies we work with. So it’s been just a great partnership for a business that this year will do over $100 million in revenue and is growing very quickly, expanding globally wanting to get these large customers. It was a situation where we could invest just over $50 million of capital. So it's just sizeable enough for us to spend our time on. And they really believed in and believe in our value proposition, how we would differentiate from traditional venture capital money...
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Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Ignore Cloud Security Assessment at Your Own Risk
CIO
...Budget practices and economics also play a role in limiting SaaS testing. Glenn Weinstein, co-founder and CIO at Appirio, a cloud services provider based in San Francisco, says IT organizations may lack a formal budget line item for SaaS testing and instead rely on the vendor to provide security. "It's still not top of mind in the budgeting process. You don't see it broken out as a separate line of the security budget."
There Are No Dumb Cloud Security Questions
Just because an enterprise lacks a formal SaaS testing budget doesn't mean it isn't asking security questions, Weinstein notes. He's seen IT security teams invest significant time with cloud vendors as part of the RFP process.
As a cloud service brokerage, Weinstein says Appirio fields client security questions. The company defers some inquires to the SaaS vendor involved in a particular customer engagement-questions regarding infrastructure, data centers and the layers of security around a given application, for example.
Appirio, meanwhile, directly addresses questions related to its own security process, Weinstein notes. The company, or its business partners, may need to access a SaaS application on the customer's behalf. This means clients are interested in how Appirio protects data from internal breaches.
Specifically, customers may ask how the company handles data in transit, or in the development environment, or when it is passed among consulting partners, Weinstein notes, adding that customers continue to grapple with what to ask of their cloud providers. "We are in the very early days," he says, "and the types of questions that customers ask about the cloud...will continue to change."
If anything, Weinstein would like to see more probing questions from customers. "We still see a lot of questions aimed at considerations that are pretty well shored up at this point."
An RFP might ask cloud vendors about penetration testing or distributed denial of service vulnerability, but Weinstein says the top enterprise providers have those issues well in hand. He'd prefer to see RFPs ask about configuration security, authentication options, and the provider's ability to control access to data among employees and third parties. He suggests that those questions more closely address the security surrounding cloud applications....
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...Budget practices and economics also play a role in limiting SaaS testing. Glenn Weinstein, co-founder and CIO at Appirio, a cloud services provider based in San Francisco, says IT organizations may lack a formal budget line item for SaaS testing and instead rely on the vendor to provide security. "It's still not top of mind in the budgeting process. You don't see it broken out as a separate line of the security budget."
There Are No Dumb Cloud Security Questions
Just because an enterprise lacks a formal SaaS testing budget doesn't mean it isn't asking security questions, Weinstein notes. He's seen IT security teams invest significant time with cloud vendors as part of the RFP process.
As a cloud service brokerage, Weinstein says Appirio fields client security questions. The company defers some inquires to the SaaS vendor involved in a particular customer engagement-questions regarding infrastructure, data centers and the layers of security around a given application, for example.
Appirio, meanwhile, directly addresses questions related to its own security process, Weinstein notes. The company, or its business partners, may need to access a SaaS application on the customer's behalf. This means clients are interested in how Appirio protects data from internal breaches.
Specifically, customers may ask how the company handles data in transit, or in the development environment, or when it is passed among consulting partners, Weinstein notes, adding that customers continue to grapple with what to ask of their cloud providers. "We are in the very early days," he says, "and the types of questions that customers ask about the cloud...will continue to change."
If anything, Weinstein would like to see more probing questions from customers. "We still see a lot of questions aimed at considerations that are pretty well shored up at this point."
An RFP might ask cloud vendors about penetration testing or distributed denial of service vulnerability, but Weinstein says the top enterprise providers have those issues well in hand. He'd prefer to see RFPs ask about configuration security, authentication options, and the provider's ability to control access to data among employees and third parties. He suggests that those questions more closely address the security surrounding cloud applications....
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