Interview: Appirio eyes Europe for future growth

Enterprise Apps Expo

Appirio is a company attracting quite a buzz on its US homeground. To date, the seven-year-old San Francisco-based cloud integrator has helped over 500 companies implement high-profile software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications – from providers including Salesforce.com, Workday, Google Apps and Cornerstone – and attracted close on $77 million in venture capital funding along the way. Its customers include well-known brands such as coffee chain Starbucks, beauty firm L’Oreal and automotive company Toyota.

In Europe, it is less well-known right now, but general manager of European operations, Lori Williams, is determined to get the Appirio name out there. Much of its most recent tranche of venture capital funding – $60 million in total, awarded in March 2012 – was earmarked for international expansion. That work is well underway, Williams says.

Enterprise Apps Expo recently spoke to Williams about the company’s strategy for Europe and its progress in the region to date. The company’s overriding goal, she told us, “is to free people and the companies they work for from the bondage of on-premise technologies.” And at the same time, the company urges prospective customers to think in terms of ‘Your Business, Reimagined’.

“That may sound a little gimmicky,” Williams acknowledges, “but the way that you approach working with things like Salesforce, Workday, Google and Cornerstone – our four primary partners – is really different. The old days of an IT project, where the first third of a project was working out how much hardware infrastructure to buy are over. Now [with SaaS], you hit the ground running on day one, working through business processes and moving things forward.”

That’s a rule that Appirio lives by itself, she adds: despite having 600 staff, spread across the US, Japan, India, UK and Ireland, “we own no servers as a company – we practice what we preach.”...

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