Successful Outsourcers are Social Animals Now

The Times

Four Must-Have Enterprise Mobile Apps

Forbes

...Another cloud services provider, Appirio helps enterprise firms make the most of new technologies and softwares like salesforce.com and Google Apps. A massive team of cloud experts identifies which inflexible softwares are bogging down your company and help bring your business dealings into the 21st century.

This extends to developing a proper mobile strategy, with configurable mobile apps and mobile content delivery. Figuring out how mobile can best impact your business is an asset few large companies can live without.

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Cloud SIs do it differently

diginomica 

...The need for speed also means that cloud SIs tend to reuse experience (and indeed custom development) from one customer to another. FirstHosted has a deliberate strategy of developing expertise in specific markets that it can leverage across customers. This is not dissimilar to the vertical strategies of traditional SIs, but with one key difference: on a multitenant cloud platform, custom code does not have to be rewritten for each customer’s separate implementation, enabling cost-effective, timely reuse.

The reusability of code written to a single, shared platform inspired cloud integrator Appirio to found the CloudSpokes developer community, where development challenges are solved by crowdsourcing. Appirio regularly uses it in projects on Salesforce.com, Google, AWS and other cloud platforms. “We’re using it in roughly 25% of our projects now,” Appirio’s CEO Chris Barbin told me earlier this month.

Barbin sees its use of CloudSpokes as a clear differentiator for the firm against larger, traditional SIs, who he feels would be reluctant to adopt the same approach because it would not suit their business model: “We believe that the next generation of evolution in the services vertical will be crowdsourcing. It’s difficult for an IBM or a Deloitte to embrace crowdsourcing because it’s taking food off their own plate.”

Last week, e-signature provider DocuSign teamed up with Appirio to add a DocuSign-specific Spoke to CloudSpokes, as file collaboration provider Box has previously done. In a statement released with the announcement, Neil Hudspith, DocuSign’s chief revenue officer, commented that in its customer engagements, “Appirio has figured out how to blend speed with business impact.” There’s that emphasis once more on speed and business outcomes...

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Appirio picks up DocuSign implementation practice

ZDNet

DocuSign has tapped global cloud integrator Appirio to handle implementation, integration and development services for its cloud-hosted e-signature transaction management technology.

Under the relationship, Appirio will expand its own use of DocuSign internally and invest in resources that will help it include the services within the solutions it offers. Currently, Appirio has more than 500 enterprise accounts.

Perhaps even more important: the alliance also means that DocuSign will become a more integral component for the roughly 75,000 independent cloud developers who participate in CloudSpokes, a community that Appirio uses to help extend the reach of its own technical resources...

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SoMoClo - ugly verbal invention but important business innovation

CloudPro

Lori Williams, European general manager at service provider Appirio says that organisations have to have a strategy that encompasses social, mobile and cloud.

“Social and mobile are fundamental changes in the way consumers and employees communicate, so a company’s strategy has to encompass both,” she says.

Cloud platforms and these applications fit naturally with both trends since cloud applications are designed to be accessible anywhere and across platforms through powerful, stable APIs. In addition, they are designed to evolve rapidly and support new ways of working, far more quickly than traditional applications.

For instance, Salesforce embraced social a few years ago with Chatter and now every one of its customers not only has access to Chatter but also the ability to create custom applications using Chatter or access Chatter data using mobile APIs. “We really see cloud as the critical enabler that helps organisations develop a technology strategy that can address social, mobile and the next revolution that comes along!” says Williams...

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Oracle and SAP ARE big software, but for how long? Choked by the cloud, or death by a 1,000 cuts

The Register

...Fewer companies ask ‘Why cloud?’. Now they ask ‘Why not cloud?’

Two such areas are sales force automation and human capital management, both focuses for Appirio, a seven-year-old, San Francisco-based cloud integrator that has helped over 500 companies implement SaaS applications from Salesforce.com, Workday, Google Apps and Cornerstone. These are not small companies, either, says Lori Williams, Appirio’s general manager of European operations. They include coffee chain Starbucks, beauty firm L’Oreal, pest control company Rentokil and automotive giant Toyota.

“Over the last year we’ve seen fewer and fewer companies here asking ‘Why cloud?’. Now they’re asking ‘Why not cloud?’ instead,” says Williams. “It’s about seeing value early from SaaS applications, rather than in 18 months or 24 months with an on-premise implementation. Big companies that are looking at a Salesforce or a Workday have baggage from previous systems that they’re trying to move away from. They’re looking for a different way. They’ve lived through the legacy way - the big, legacy, on-premise projects with lots of people and lots of money involved.”...

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Immigration vs. Job Creation in America

CNBC

Narinder Singh, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Appirio, says U.S. immigration policy must be addressed in the context of job creation.

                     

Appirio extends European reach

ZDNet

Cloud integrator Appirio, known for its crowdsourcing approach to cloud integration projects, has expanded its presence in Europe with several customer wins just two years after entering the market.

The companies that it is announcing publicly include test preparation company Kaplan, online betting site Sportingbet, and  global energy and mining research company Wood Mackenzie. Another global client is media and information services company McGraw-Hill.

Appirio cites mergers and acquisitions in the financial, retail and media sectors as one key factor driving new business -- as companies seek to integrate their information technology assets...

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Cloud broker or cloud provider: Who says you can't be both?

TechTarget

...Appirio, a cloud service broker, offers its customers both a pure advisory service and a technology focus, with integration capabilities among its public cloud provider partners -- Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Workday -- said Glenn Weinstein, Appirio's chief technology officer. "Regardless of what we are helping our clients with, we always bring to bear our own Cloud Enablement Suite (CES) -- Appirio's offering that organizes the entire integration project, everything from implementation to monitoring of their cloud platforms," he said.

In addition to CES, Appirio has three Software-as-a-Service offerings for its clients that work with Google, Salesforce and Workday platforms. Appirio's Cloud Factor ties together Google Apps with Gmail, and the broker's Cloud Sync and Cloud Storage offerings link Salesforce, Google Apps and Amazon Web Services to extend the capabilities of each platform for customers, Weinstein said. "Appirio is filling two big spaces for customers by offering both the product-ized integration across cloud systems, and also a customized service for managing cloud platforms," he said...

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