What Makes Appirio Special?
What does it mean to “Accelerate the Cloud Powered Business”?
Cloud computing is transforming how enterprises use technology—cloud providers like Salesforce, Google, Workday, and Amazon offer infrastructure, platforms, and business applications that enterprises of all sizes are consuming “as a service” instead of running in their own data centers.
Over the past 5 years, we’ve learned that the real impact of cloud computing actually isn’t in the technology. The real impact is taking the the things that people like about the cloud and applying them to the business. We call that building a cloud-powered business, and that’s what we do at Appirio—accelerate the cloud-powered business.
Building a cloud-powered business requires recognizing the ways that your business has been boxed in by the limitations of your old, on-premise technology... and breaking through those limitations. For example. It is expensive and time consuming to change on premise technology, so IT is too often an inhibitor of innovation instead of an enabler. On-premise technology is brittle, so your data is stuck in silos, behind a firewall. These are all things that constrain how your business operates.
A cloud-powered business is different: The cloud allows your business to do more with less, and makes you agile enough to adapt to changing market conditions. Cloud technology makes information available to an increasingly mobile, social workforce. This is much more than just a technology change—you need to rethink what’s possible when your business runs on the cloud.
What is a cloud solution provider?
Appirio offers a portfolio of solutions to help companies throughout their cloud adoption lifecycle. Our professional services start with cloud strategy—building your roadmap to the cloud-powered business. Then we offer cloud migration—helping drive successful Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Custom Cloud and Collaboration Cloud Deployments for Salesforce, or helping drive adoption of Google Apps for communication and collaboration or Workday for HR and Finance. We also help extend those deployments through custom application development, which we then support and enhance for our customers through our cloud management offering. All of these services are powered by our unique cross-cloud technology and community.
How are your services powered by technology and community?
All of Appirio’s services are powered by our unique cross-cloud technology and community.
Appirio believes in the power of community. Our customers benefit not just from our own internal community of cloud experts that collaborate on every cloud project we do, but also our captive offshore team, that offers a flexible, trusted economical extension to our on-shore teams. And our leading customers are starting to crowdsource solutions from public communities, including our own CloudSpokes community, with more than 20,000 cross-cloud developers.
All of our clients also benefit Appirio’s unique cloud technology—deep intellectual property that we’ve built up over the course of 800 different cloud projects. Our Cloud Asset Library jump-starts the building of your cloud solutions, our Cloud Management Center helps you manage the successful execution of your cloud projects and ongoing cloud improvements, and our CloudFactor technology helps connect cloud apps—for example, showing you relevant CRM data when you get an email from a customer or prospect.
What makes Appirio different?
The enterprises we’ve worked with realize that building a cloud-powered business requires a cloud-focused partner—the old way of doing things just doesn’t make sense in the cloud. We’ve seen how disruptive cloud computing has been to traditional infrastructure and application providers—we’re using those same characteristics to disrupt the $300B professional services industry. What makes the cloud powerful is how specialized cloud service providers offer elastic, on-demand access to a set of constantly improving services that that just get better over time. Why choose a partner that isn’t specialized, isn’t elastic, isn’t agile, and isn’t on-demand? Legacy SIs start from scratch every time and it takes years to see any value—that’s always been the story for massive, on-premise technology projects and that’s what enterprises see when they try to bring the “old way” of doing things in the cloud. New technology requires a new type of partner with a way of doing things.
Two things set Appirio apart. The first is our expertise—we have an experienced team with more successful enterprise-class cloud deployments than anyone in the industry. The second is our innovation—we’ve consistently been the first to deploy new cloud technologies from VisualForce to Sites to AppEngine to Chatter. We’ve been recognized for our innovation by BusinessWeek, AlwaysOn, and Gartner.
But it’s the recognition from our clients that we value the most. The CIOs that we work with say that Appirio delivers higher impact, faster results, and increased confidence in their journey to the cloud.
Do you practice what you preach?
From the beginning, we have run our own business as a serverless enterprise. We run our business using Salesforce CRM to manage our customers, Workday to manage our people and financials, Google Apps to collaborate, FinancialForce’s PSA to manage our services organization and our own CloudFactor broker technology to bring it all together. As a result, we've grown our business by 400% over the past two years, spent about 3% of our revenue on IT, and have zero capital tied up in IT infrastructure.