Cloud service brokers must differentiate as cloud market matures

SearchCloudProvider

Cloud service brokers must be a trusted partner to the customer while maintaining strong ties with cloud providers, said Glenn Weinstein, chief technology officer of Appirio, a cloud service broker that offers its 300 enterprise customers cloud services and platforms from public cloud providers Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Workday.

Appirio works with its public cloud partners via consulting or technology partnerships. "We are recommending their services based on the customer's needs," Weinstein said, noting that their cloud provider partners recommend Appirio to prospective customers looking for a partner to do complex implementations.

"When [cloud providers and cloud service brokers] are working with large enterprises, there typically is a great deal of implantation work," he said.

Cloud service brokers should focus on cloud federation, said Weinstein, as some customers are usually shopping for more than one public cloud solution or application.

Survival guide: Do's and don'ts for next-gen IT

Computerworld

"The first thing you need to realize is that your business customers can leave or go around you in any number of ways," says Singh. "If people have an iPhone, they're going to use that for work, whether you want them to or not. If IT doesn't provide cloud storage, they'll sign up for their own Dropbox account. They aren't going to wait six to eight weeks for you to provision something for them. You can no longer treat business users as a captive entity. Instead, you'll have to become a consultant to the business and prove to them the value of what IT can do."

IT departments that wish to stay relevant in a BYOD and cloud-based world will need to redefine themselves as service providers. They'll need to make the leap from being technicians responsible for maintaining systems to experts who offer a menu of services and offer intelligent recommendations about which ones will help drive the business forward...

Memo From Appirio: Public Cloud Is A Partner Opportunity

Talkin' Cloud

How can you survive and thrive through the cloud revolution? Appirio Chief Strategic Officer Narinder Singh offered his views on public cloud computing opportunities during the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit today in Scottsdale, Ariz. Here is a live blog covering Singh’s views.

The keynote is especially interesting since so many pundits say VARs, MSPs and cloud consultants should focus on private cloud and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) opportunities. But Appirio offers a healthy reminder that IT projects involving the public cloud represent big opportunities. Here’s more…

Salesforce.com's front office suite play

ZDNet

Right now it is convenient for Salesforce.com to hammer home the ’social business’ play because that’s how it drives attention as the leader in that space. They also have the benefit of encouraging a large subset of otherwise under employed PR and marketing people to declare expertise in this field and so amplify the broader message. The projected numbers are impressive as well. From the Benioff conference call:

Gartner says that CRM is 15% of the purchase intention of global CIOs this year. That’s the       number one global purchasing intention.

While I am usually down on Gartner I’m not going to argue about that prediction for several reasons. It is sufficiently near term for there to be good reasons to assume they’re not far off the mark and from soundings in the market, CRM as a broad category within the ERP framework is still a big draw. There are other factors in play that reinforce this idea....

3. The explosive growth in demand at Appirio for applications that stitch together elements of the marketing online puzzle with Salesforce.com implies there is much experimentation going on...

Inside the mind of a cloud consultant with Appirio

ZDNet

Earlier today I caught up with Narinder Singh, co-founder Appirio and a great sounding board for cloud consulting and implementation topics.

As background, Appirio has around 500 consultants and an ecosystem of around 42,000 developers on Cloudspokes. The company recently raised $60 million in its bid to become a one stop cloud integration and implementation shop.

This video is a prequel to a video conversation I shall be recording between Jon Reed and myself tomorrow evening (7pm CET. 6pm GMT, 1pm ET, 10am PT.) I want to put Jon on the spot to discuss what needs to happen and especially around the skillset and change management required. Both of us are very familiar with the SAP ecosystem as an example but this is not just about that company. The same challenges are going to hold true for other players like Oracle which is set to announce its public cloud offerings on 6th June. I wonder what they will have to say about this topic?...

In One Adjective, Please Tell Me Who You Are

The New York Times

This interview with Chris Barbin, chief executive of Appirio, an information technology company that focuses on cloud services, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What are some important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

A. I would start with transparency — it is a huge part of our culture, and what I think makes a company and team really thrive and work. You should never surprise an employee. I’ve had experiences in my career where you’re building something, you think everything’s great and all of a sudden there’s a layoff. That should never happen. The team should know. We have meetings every other week in the company, and we use a system of red light, yellow light, green light on the key attributes of the business, like financials, customers and team.

From my experience at bigger companies, I think there’s a tendency to overanalyze, with too many metrics. It can be confusing, so you have to boil it down to simple, crisp goals that you hammer and repeat. That’s part of transparency, too...

10 More Hot Products From Interop 2012

CRN

Cloud provider Appirio introduced new features for its CloudFactor application, which is a part of its Cloud Enablement Suite of applications, analytics and a crowdsourcing community for managing enterprise cloud initiatives.

CloudFactor brings Salesforce.com information into Google Apps and allows users to access Salesforce CRM information in Gmail. CloudFactor was first introduced in 2010 as CloudWorks.

CloudFactor allows users to access and manage relevant customer information to improve data quality and decision making. The application supports Group and Professional Edition Salesforce tenants and is available to install via the Salesforce AppExchange and Google Apps Marketplace.

The CloudFactor upgrades include Salesforce.com Chatter integration, an embedded Twitter search widget, and customization and administration options.

6 Tools to Build a Mobile App on the Cheap

Mashable

Dave Messinger, chief architect of CloudSpokes, says his company is "the first developer community that matches the cloud with the crowd — a true market where businesses tap into skills and pay for results versus effort, and where developers get access to a new world of opportunity to earn money for cloud development.”

The service, built by cloud solutions brand Appirio, allows companies to outsource any form of public cloud development work — entire mobile applications, Facebook pages and technical components for enterprises — in the form of a competition. After customers post a deadline alongside technical specifications, developers in the community submit entries, which are then judged by the customer or the CloudSpokes team.

“For developers, this approach creates a market for their talents, lets them develop new skills with real world assignments and transitions their careers to the cloud while establishing street cred as skilled practitioners,” Messinger says. “For companies (including Appirio), this means tapping into a developer ecosystem and paying only for the components of work that meet pre-agreed upon requirements.”

The success of CloudSpokes reflects the effectiveness an entirely unique approach to app development: A gamified network of freelance contributors. Current challenges range from the bizarre — a Python-based app that can create a route guiding users to every train station on a given system within 24 hours — to the highly practical, including an app to facilitate financial aid application processes by extracting information from existing tax files. (Original Article)

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...

A how-to guide for Web APIs

SD Times

...Narinder Singh, cofounder of Appirio and CloudSpokes, said there are more hard-and-fast rules regarding APIs than just not changing them. CloudSpokes is a site where developers collect bounties on application requirements. Companies put up requests, typically along the lines of “use Google Maps' API and our Salesforce application to make maps of deliveries.” Due to the nature of modern Web development, almost every CloudSpokes solution uses at least a few Web APIs.

With all those developers building with Web APIs, Singh has seen what it takes to make a successful API. “[Cloud VOIP service] Twilio has done a good job with their API,” he said. “How do I know? Because every time we run a contest on CloudSpokes that has requirements like 'Pick two things and mash them up,' Twilio shows up a disproportionate number of times, even when the use case doesn't quite fit.”

For its Valentine’s Day contest, CloudSpokes asked developers to build applications that could get them a date. Three of the five final entries used Twilio. One of those applications, said Singh, automatically found potential suitors via dating sites, then connected the possible couple via VOIP using Twilio...

Appirio masters the automation of professional services

ZDNet

By now, we’re used to enterprise cloud application vendors paving their IPO roadmap with mega funding announcements, but last week saw the first such news for an enterprise cloud integrator. Appirio’s $60 million Series D round mostly from General Atlantic is a different order of funding from its previous total of $20 million. It’s especially notable in the context of my suggestion a week earlier that we might see “the virtual extinction of the traditional systems integrator” as the new breed of cloud integrators “scale up their own more customizable automation to address the high-end enterprise market.” Or as the Forbes headline more bluntly expressed it, Appirio Raises $60M to Take on Accenture...

Appirio Rises As Businesses Gaze Into The Cloud

The Wall Street Journal

...Appirio will face competition from big systems integrators like Accenture and Deloitte Development LLC that are several times its size, but Barbin believes that his company’s experience and its intellectual property give it a head start.

His team has done deployments of Salesforce.com, Google, Amazon.com and Workday software, among others, and will continue to add other specialties, possibly including Service-now.com, which offers software for IT management. Barbin said he gets eight to 10 requests a week from potential partners wanting Appirio to set up a practice around their software.

Appirio has offices in Japan, India, Singapore and the U.K., which it entered in September through the acquisition of Saaspoint, a Salesforce and Google partner, and expects to make more acquisitions...

Appirio Raises $60M to Take on Accenture

Forbes

...this is the opportunity for Appirio, whose mission includes helping customers get the maximum value from cloud implementations.

But Appirio is not just a group of high-paid consultants. The company actually has some innovative systems, such as CloudSpokes — a community of more than 35,000 developers who submit their solutions, then are awarded prizes by a panel of judges.

“One of our clients ran a contest to implement complex timezone calculations in their Salesforce application that would have cost several thousand dollars for a traditional systems integrator to do,” Appirio CEO Chris Barbin said. “But with CloudSpokes, we got multiple working solutions for just $750 in prize money.”..

Appirio founder on cloud-services firm's latest funding round -- and Chicago as a startup hub

Crain's Chicago Business

Appirio Inc., which offers technology and professional services to companies' cloud applications, today announced a $60 million investment led by General Atlantic, with participation from Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital.

Appirio is based in San Mateo, Calif., but the company's chief executive, Chris Barbin, spends at least a third of his time in Chicago, where he calls Glenview home.

Mr. Barbin, 41, who early in his career worked for Lake Forest-based W.W. Grainger Inc., says the latest round of funding is the largest of its kind in a cloud services provider and will allow Appirio not only to continue developing its crowdsourcing development platform, CloudSpokes, but also will enable the company to snap up other consulting firms...

Appirio raises $60M to be your one-stop cloud service shop

VentureBeat

...“We are seeing more companies going cloud first, saying they’re not ever going to buy another server,” said Chris Barbin, Appirio chief executive, “We’re also seeing companies making the migration to 100% cloud to reduce costs and help them scale faster.”

The five-year-old company started out helping big companies adopt cloud services such as Google Apps, Salesforce, and Workday. It then turned its attention to cloud app development, creating apps that tie together multiple cloud services and social networks. For example, it developed an app that integrates Google Calendar and contacts with Salesforce calendar and contact lists.

Appirio’s current offerings run the gamut of cloud services. The company will help you decide which cloud service is right for your company, build custom apps to work with the cloud, move your data to the cloud, and manage the cloud services it’s set up for your business. Essentially, it hopes to move your business away from in-house IT departments and run it solely in the cloud...

New-look integrator Appirio raises $60M

GigaOM

...The company built its business by diving into the then-relatively new world of software as a service, helping companies deploy and customize services from Salesforce.com and Google and ensuring that they worked with customers’ older legacy software.

Appirio Chief Strategy Officer Narinder Singh said the company’s revenue has grown 80 percent every year since it was founded almost six years ago, but would not comment on profitability...

Appirio: Cloud Makes Global Systems Integrators Obsolete

SiliconANGLE

...Narinder Singh, co-founder of cloud integrator Appirio, reached out directly to CIOs in a blog entry today to explain in no uncertain terms just how critical the global cloud system integrator model is to the future of IT – and just how painfully obsolete the existing global systems integrator business has become.

“After the first World War, the French constructed the Maginot Line - a set of fortifications, tanks obstacles and other fixed positions to defend the country. It was ‘extolled as a work of genius‘ up until the point of World War II, when it became clear that armies were structurally more mobile and agile than ever before. The Maginot Line was essentially driven around and France was successfully invaded in just a few days. The global systems integrator model is the Maginot Line of the cloud world,” writes Singh...

Cloud-consulting company Appirio wins $60 million

Reuters

Cloud-consulting company Appirio said it raised $60 million, in a round of funding led by General Atlantic, that will allow it to buy other companies and build out its development platform, CloudSpokes.

The funding, from General Atlantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital, underscores the venture's continuing belief in the cloud, which allows businesses to buy computing resources such as software applications and data management much as they buy utilities. Previously, companies typically maintained their own computing infrastructure.

Appirio helps companies such as Avon, Motorola and Starbucks move to cloud-based services offered by companies including Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Workday...

Appirio Receives $60 Million In VC Funding, Plans More Acquisitions

CRN

Cloud provider Appirio said it has received $60 million in venture funding, much of which it plans to use for mergers and acquisitions to bolster its worldwide cloud consulting practice.

The funding, one the largest of its kind according to Appirio, will also be invested in its technologies and in its CloudSpokes crowdsourcing developer community, which has more than 30,000 developers in more than 65 countries.

The Series D funding is being provided by the investment firm General Atlantic, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital, Appirio said...

Appirio: Cloud Makes Global Systems Integrators Obsolete

SiliconANGLE

Narinder Singh, co-founder of cloud integrator Appirio, reached out directly to CIOs in a blog entry today to explain in no uncertain terms just how critical the global cloud system integrator model is to the future of IT – and just how painfully obsolete the existing global systems integrator business has become.

“After the first World War, the French constructed the Maginot Line - a set of fortifications, tanks obstacles and other fixed positions to defend the country. It was ‘extolled as a work of genius‘ up until the point of World War II, when it became clear that armies were structurally more mobile and agile than ever before. The Maginot Line was essentially driven around and France was successfully invaded in just a few days. The global systems integrator model is the Maginot Line of the cloud world,” writes Singh...

Cloud Software Use Accelerates, Says Citi

Barron's

Citigroup‘s Walter Pritchard today writes that the software-as-a-service, or SaaS, market for enterprise applications has arrived at a “ripping point,” by which he means that the practice of ripping out older software and replacing it with cloud-based, hosted applications, appears to be accelerating.

Based on a conversation with Appirio, a San Mateo, California systems integrator for SaaS, Pritchard observed there is a hefty amount of removal being done of older enterprise resource planning, or “ERP,” applications...

Next-gen integrators automate how you buy IT

ZDNet

...There’s still a demand from larger customers for sophisticated custom capabilities, but the new generation of providers such as Cloud Sherpas, Appirio and others offer that custom service on top of a bedrock of highly automated processes. As CEO of the newly enlarged Cloud Sherpas David Northington confirmed to me this week, “Work can be carried out offsite, in many ways automated. There’s clearly an industrialized approach that works in many segments of the market and people are quite happy with that.”..

How to build a developer community from scratch

VentureBeat

Whether you’re a company in need of development work, or someone with an open source project that needs contributions, leveraging a developer community can seem like a simple and cost-effective solution.

The promise of having hundreds or even thousands of independent, talented workers solving your development problems around the clock appears to be a dream come true.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that easily. You can’t add the word “developer” to your website and expect hundreds of developers to suddenly support your initiatives and grow organically.

Developer communities are called communities for a reason — they are beneficial to everyone involved and take a lot of work to both grow and maintain. Work that includes time, transparency, and in some cases, significant funding...

Gmail Integration Battle - Cirrus Insight vs Appirio Cloudworks

Trineo

...It’s great to see these products that customers have been craving finally come to market. It’s a shame that Salesforce.com didn’t build an official integration like this a long time ago.

After using the 2 products side by side (literally with Cirrus Insight to the right of an email and Cloudworks underneath) I’d give the slight edge to Cloudworks at this time. They are both very good products but Cloudworks is slightly cheaper and offers a little bit more functionality.

No longer can it be an excuse that it’s too hard to keep the CRM up to date!

Cloud service broker Appirio: Focus on fewer partners, avoid the hype

SearchCloudProvider

Editor's note: If there's any concrete evidence of how cloud computing is changing the channel, it might be the emergence of a new species of channel partner, the cloud service broker -- part consultant, part integrator and all cloud.

Glenn Weinstein, CTO of cloud service broker Appirio, shared his vision for 2012 in the third of our four-part Q&A series on cloud provider strategy for the year ahead. Appirio -- which partners with Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com and Workday -- is on a mission to expose what it sees as the market's biggest liability: cloud washers. The cloud service broker's tongue-in-cheek awards ceremony, the Cloud Washies, modeled after Hollywood's unofficial "Razzies" (honoring the worst movies of the year), took aim at Oracle and Microsoft as some of the worst offenders.

It's unclear what marketing tricks Appirio has up its sleeve for 2012, but Weinstein told SearchCloudProvider.com that its business and technical strategy as a cloud broker is well-defined: Go global and go enterprise...

How Appirio can help transform your sales and business process

WWWireframe.com

Despite the countless advantages cloud computing offers to enterprises, adoption has been steady yet slow. Now one company in San Mateo is changing all that.

Appirio, founded in 2006 by Chris Barbin, Narinder Singh, Glenn Weinstein, and Mike O’Brien, offers a full range of cloud computing services that is helping businesses make the transition to cloud computing easier, faster and in a more cost-effective way. Apart from offering a predefined set of solutions and services — they’re also working on innovation in cloud integration, mobile cloud and social enterprise. And here’s the best part, they do all this serious work while still maintaining a very healthy sense of humor.

5 Worst Cloud Washers Of 2011

InformationWeek

...That means that "cloud computing" is a new way of doing things that hasn't shaken down into a strict definition--it's still a moving target. At the same time, it's only fair to say that some vendors are exploiting that opening and cloud washing their products.

On Wednesday, Dec. 14, cloud consulting company Appirio will host the Cloudwashies—an "awards" event similar to the Razzies awards for bad movies. I've got my own list of nominees for top cloud washers--those parties who have done the most to try to make a previous generation product look and sound like cloud...

Appirio Storms European Cloud Market With Saaspoint Buy

CRN

Cloud provider Appirio extended its reach into Europe on Friday with the acquisition of Saaspoint, a cloud consulting services provider that gives Appirio a stronger arsenal of cloud consultants and a new physical presence in the U.K. and Ireland.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not divulged. The Saaspoint buy marks San Mateo, Calif.-based Appirio's fourth acquisition this year and beefs up its global presence with a foundation in Europe in addition to the U.S., Japan and India....

Red Robot Labs acquires Supermono, Appirio buys Saaspoint to expand to the UK

TechCrunch

...Cloud solutions company Appirio, which just raised funding from Salesforce.com and other strategic backers, has acquired Saaspoint, a provider of cloud consulting services.

Saaspoint brings Appirio experienced cloud consultants, as well as a physical presence in the UK and Ireland, in an effort to aggressively expand across Europe.

Founded in 2005 by early Salesforce.com employees, Saaspoint boasts offices in the UK and Ireland, and has served more than 100 global customers including companies such as British Gas, Dell, eBay, Paypal, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble and UBM...

San Mateo's Appirio to buy Saaspoint

Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

...San Mateo-based Appirio says it is a "technology-enabled services provider that helps enterprises power their businesses with the cloud." London-based Saaspoint provides cloud consulting services and gives Appirio a physical presence in the UK and Ireland.

The deal marks Appirio's fourth acquisition in 2011 and adds to the company's plans to expand further into Europe. It has an existing footprint in the United States and Japan...

Appirio enters UK market with Saaspoint buy

CloudPro

Appirio today revealed it has bought Irish firm Saaspoint for an undisclosed sum.

The US cloud services company announced back in September it wanted to grow its base across Europe and now hopes picking up the cloud consultancy will make the transition an easy one.

“With the acquisition of Saaspoint today, [we] are one step further in our quest to be THE pure-play global cloud integrator,” wrote Chris Barbin, chief executive (CEO) of Appirio, on the company’s blog...

Appirio acquires Saaspoint for push into Europe

ZDNet

In its fourth acquisition of the past 12 months, cloud integrator Appirio has announced it is buying long-established European pureplay Salesforce.com integrator Saaspoint. The acquisition is Appirio’s first significant foray into the European theater, delivering on the international expansion promised after GGV Capital and Salesforce.com invested in the company in August.

Saaspoint was founded in 2005 by the founders of salesforce.com’s European operations and has its corporate administration in rural offices near Dublin, Ireland, with headquarters in London. It is regarded as one of Europe’s leading Salesforce.com integrators (see previous coverage), although its activities are mainly limited to Ireland and the UK, where customers include well-known names such as British Gas, CitiLink and Rentokil...

Shining the harsh light on Cloudwashing

Forrester blog
...Appirio, a cloud integration and customization solution provider has created the cloud computing equivalent of the Razzie Awards to recognize and call out those vendors it and its clients see as the most aggregious cloudwashing offenders. The first annual Washies will be announced next Wednesday night at The Cigar Bar in San Francisco and in true Razzie tradition, the nominees are invited to attend and pick up their dubious honors in person. I'm betting that Larry Ellison will be otherwise engaged.

While some will be offended to be nominated, the recognition here is meant to be a bit of a roast to those marketing ahead of their capabilities as well as a fun way to help spread market education about what truly is (and is not) cloud computing. It's understandable why the vendors who cloudwash their solutions do it, as the word can get you a meeting with a key customer and that customer at the end of the day may turn out not to need cloud at all and thus end up buying that vendor's traditional IT solution. Same with I&O pros. If calling your virtualized server environment cloud gets executive pressure off so you can better plan a real cloud strategy, mission accomplished. But this practice creates market confusion and can ultimately hurt the offender as their credibility takes a hit in comparison to true cloud efforts. I&O teams that claim private cloud for their VMware environment and aren't delivering self-service, cloud economics or automation, risk losing the trust with their developers who may just turn up their noses at IT and go straight to the public cloud. Try selling them on your true private cloud after that...

Google Wraps Internet Explorer in Chrome Clothing

WIRED

...Google declined to provide statistics on the adoption of Chrome and Chrome Frame inside businesses, but Russell says he had seen companies officially make the move to Chrome Frame, and others outside of Google are saying much the same. Appirio — an outfit that helps companies adopt new-age cloud computing services from the likes of Google and Salesforce.com — tells Wired that it too is working to move businesses, including Morgan Stanley, onto Google’s IE plug-in.

“We’re not surprised anymore when when see [IE7],” says Appirio chief technology officer Glenn Weinstein. “It’s dismaying to see how many large enterprises are still clinging to IE-only browser policies. You’d think that companies would have come around by now. But they haven’t.”...

Cloud integrators offer assessment, integration and ongoing support

SearchNetworkingChannel

...Cloud integrators that get into a client's business early enough have the ability to plan both current integration and further expansion into the cloud.

Appirio, for example, works at all stages of cloud development – strategy, rollout of SaaS apps, migration of customer business processes to the cloud, and cloud management. The company focuses on selling salesforce.com, Google and Workday.

While Appirio's services aim to assess the current integration landscape, the company also looks to identify future integration of architecture, as well as integration for cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-on-premise. The company sells this cloud integration management as part of a monthly contract...

Cloud Providers Locked And Loaded For Social Revolution

CRN

...By many accounts, the social revolution is already happening. But for solution providers, it's appears to be just the beginning.

"This has hit a nerve for companies that they were seeing but couldn't articulate," said Narinder Singh, co-founder and chief strategy officer for San Mateo, Calif.-based cloud provider Appirio, which just recently launched a social toolkit of apps to help bridge the divide between social platforms and add more functionality to customer social infrastructures.

Singh said the idea of a social enterprise has sparked customers' interest -- more so than with cloud computing. Singh said with cloud computing, there was always an "if," with social it's "when and how." And that has opened doors for Appirio to come in and ask, "How do we make you a social enterprise?"...

Appirio Launches Cloud Social Networking Connector Toolkit

Talkin' Cloud

Cloud integrator Appirio has announced a new Social Enterprise Toolkit designed to help customers connect new applications with existing social networks. In plainer terms, Appirio has released a set of 20-plus tools to help bring its customers closer with Salesforce Chatter, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social web while still meeting their specific regulatory or feature needs.

Here are some examples of social media features and integrations the toolkit brings, as per Appirio’s press release...

Appirio ‘Honoring’ the Best of the Worst in the Cloud

Talkin' Cloud

Following in the footsteps of the infamous Razzie awards given to the people responsible for the worst movies of the year, cloud integrator Appirio has invited me to the inaugural Washies: an awards ceremony designed to publicly shame those vendors who claim a solution is “cloud” when it’s really just a fresh coat of paint on an aging legacy solution.

The idea, according to Appirio’s blog entry, is to have a little fun at the expense of those companies who are dead-set on capitalizing on cloud hype without taking the time or effort to really understand what that means. And thus far response from the cloud services channel and other IT pros has already been outstanding, the company noted, with early votes and nominees flooding in...

Appirio Digs Deeper Into Social Enterprise With Toolkit

CRN

Cloud provider Appirio has taken Salesforce.com's social enterprise vision to heart and at Cloudforce New York this week launched a social enterprise toolkit the company says breaks down social silos, boosts collaboration and spurs greater adoption of social enterprise tools.

Comprising nearly 20 social assets, some of which were built through Appirio's CloudSpokes crowdsourcing development community, the toolkit targets a trio of challenges inherent in any social-focused enterprise rollout: integration between new and existing applications and social networks, making new social applications engaging for users and ensuring compliance with company policies, said Appirio co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Narinder Singh...

Appirio Makes Salesforce Chatter + Twitter Integration into a Contest

ReadWriteWeb

To a rapidly increasing degree, Salesforce Chatter is becoming the communications platform for essentially all classes of business, in both the public and private sectors. There was a time when Salesforce tools were considered to be leveraged against Twitter and Facebook as social platforms, but for certain segments of the user base, that leverage is reversing itself.

Now the mobile application framework provider Appirio, which ReadWriteWeb introduced to you last June, is opening up a kind of persistent contest for the open source community, with a channel for distributing a new class of tools that would effectively leverage these consumer social tools on Salesforce's business social tool...

Appirio Social Enterprise Toolkit Links To Chatter

InformationWeek

Cloud integration specialist Appirio has introduced a Social Enterprise Toolkit, which is essentially a greatest hits collection of apps for Salesforce.com's Chatter.

The toolkit is a collection of software assets accumulated through many integration projects, as well as a developer crowdsourcing collaboration with CloudSpokes, said Narinder Singh, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Appirio. "A lot of them are new, added over the last few weeks or months, because we've been adding to the asset library so quickly," he said...

5 things entrepreneurs should know about the cloud

OC Register

...Bergeron presented at “The Power of The Cloud” event Monday evening along with Narinder Singh, chief strategy officer at Appirio and others before an audience of more than 100 local businesspeople and I.T. professionals . Both Ingram Micro, Orange County’s largest revenue earning company, and Appirio, a startup based in San Mateo, are looking to help companies move to cloud services.

Below I culled five key things entrepreneurs should know about the cloud from presentations and interviews with the speakers...

Consultants in the Cloud

The New York Times

...While Google has worked without a large consulting partner, it should be said that several smaller consultancies are working to encourage companies to adopt Google’s cloud-based office productivity software.

Among these are Dito, SADA Systems, Appirio and Cloud Sherpas. Each offers a somewhat different approach. SADA is reselling both Microsoft and Google products. Appirio offers Google along with a broad range of other cloud services for business, like Salesforce.com. Dito is making much of moving companies to Google’s Chromebooks, which are lightweight laptops built for cloud interactions. Cloud Sherpas is among the largest consultants stressing Apps, and it claims to have moved over 1 million people to Google Apps...

Cloud Provider Appirio To Recognize 'Cloudwashers'

CRN

Cloud solution provider Appirio is calling out the false cloud and is planning a tongue-in-cheek awards ceremony recognizing the year's biggest "cloudwashers," or vendors and organizations that have used the term "cloud" to describe products and services that actually aren't cloud at all.

Dubbed "the Washies," the awards will be "given to the worst offenders of painting over traditional IT technology with the word 'cloud,' even though it offers little-to-none of the benefits that cloud computing brings," Appirio wrote on its Web site for the Washies, through which it is also accepting nominations...

Salesforce.com and Model Metrics

Enterprise Irregulars

...I wondered if its announced acquisition of Model Metrics was a change in strategy. I asked Narinder Singh, co-founder at Appirio, and as he has blogged “Since early this year, Salesforce has aligned their entire company and all of their considerable marketing might around the social enterprise…..By adding Model’s mobile development and UI capabilities to their team, Salesforce will be able to make the social enterprise vision tangible for customers.”

In other words it extends Salesforce’s push on Chatter and acquisitions like Radian6.

Narinder adds “We are somewhat relieved to know they will be focused on driving the social enterprise and mobility for Salesforce (and therefore with us), instead of being our most worthy competitor.”...

The Invisible Social Enterprise: What Every Exec Needs to Know Today

ReadWriteWeb

In an article last year for the Sales Ops Council, I introduced the idea of the "invisible social enterprise," how employees are already using social networks to create real business value often without the knowledge of the executive team.

Things have changed a lot over the past year: Salesforce.com chose "Social Enterprise" as the theme for their Dreamforce 2011 conference, Google recently released their Google+ social network to enterprise customers, and more companies are using public social networks like Twitter as formal marketing and support channels to their customers...