Appirio: Crowdsourcing crucial for scaling cloud projects

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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