What Makes Appirio Special?
What does it mean to Accelerate On-Demand™?
Appirio delivers products and services that help companies more successfully adopt on-demand business solutions (sometimes known as "Software as a Service").
On-demand software is transforming the enterprise. More than ever, companies of all sizes are deploying solutions like Google Apps or Salesforce.com instead of installing and maintaining their own on-premise applications. Appirio guides our customers through implementation and integration of on-demand enterprise applications to help them realize the benefits of Software as a Service– no maintenance, easier configuration, higher reliability, and wider adoption.
Why is Appirio focused on delivering both products and services?
As on-demand becomes the predominant model for delivering enterprise software, the separation between firms providing software and services will blur, and in many cases, disappear completely. Market-leading companies like salesforce.com provide robust on-demand platforms that are highly extensible, and enable companies like Appirio to deliver both services and value-added solutions that are also delivered on-demand.
For the customer, on-demand has refocused efforts on solving business problems, not IT infrastructure issues. The ideal partner helps the customer focus on and solve these problems. Appirio believes that the partner who can solve each customer's individual business problems, while at the same time using those insights to address the overall market need, will be the better long-term partner.
Customers expect on-demand solution providers to create products faster and more frequently. Unlike the on-premise software development model, engineering teams for on-demand products can no longer simply collect customer requirements, disappear for months or years, and deliver a solution. For both the customer and the vendor, this environment creates a strong synergy between services and software that results in a constant cycle of service productization.
What kind of services do you provide?
Appirio delivers a full range of services, including strategy, implementation, and education. However, we differentiate ourselves in the areas of application development and integration. We have particular experience in these areas, and believe they are critical to accelerating the adoption of on-demand solutions in medium and large enterprises.
More on Appirio's service offerings
What kind of products do you provide?
Appirio offers enterprise-class, fully supported applications that connect and extend today's leading on-demand platforms. We have over 1,500 companies using our applications to bring together technologies from Google, Salesforce.com, and Amazon. Our vision is to bring the business context from all of a company’s on-demand enterprise applications into the productivity tools that individuals use as they work. We want "Solutions for Business" + "Solutions for People" to finally create "Solutions for Business People."
More on Appirio's current products
What differentiates Appirio from other companies?
- Deep and real world experience in complex integrations and large scale enterprise deployments, such as webMethods, SAP, and Accenture
- Proven ability to create enterprise applications that fit into an on-demand platform
- Exclusive focus on on-demand enablement
- The ability to understand and balance the requirements of both “the business” and IT - our consultants have spent their careers on working on each side of the fence
Do you practice what you preach - does Appirio run on an on-demand platform?
Appirio runs on software-as-a-service. We live and breathe it every day. We have an intimate sense of the strengths and limitations of this approach, and have gained tremendous experience in making these SaaS solutions work together.
- We use salesforce.com for sales force automation, including leads, campaigns, opportunities, forecasting, and dashboards
- We use salesforce.com for service & support and the customer portal to support our products
- We built a recruiting manager application on salesforce.com to manage the hiring process
- We built a professional services automation (PSA) application on salesforce.com to manage consultant scheduling, project billing, and customer surveys
- We built an IT asset tracker application on salesforce.com to manage our laptops and other hardware (although honestly we don't have much!)
- We use Google Apps for our enterprise email and calendaring
- We use Google Docs and Spreadsheets for word processing, spreadsheets, and document collaboration
- We use QuickBooks Online for our financials
- We use KAIG Online for administering employee benefits and payroll
- We use Citrix GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar for virtual conferencing and desktop sharing
- We use BVFreeConferencing for teleconferencing
- On the road we rely on T-Mobile hotspots for network connectivity
In fact, Appirio has vowed to never own a server, leading the way to the "serverless enterprise."
Why Did Appirio Get Started?
The founders of Appirio built our careers creating and deploying application and infrastructure software to medium and large enterprises. Through these experiences, we have come to recognize some flaws in the "on-premise" software model:
- Vendors' operations focus on large one-time transactions, rather than sustained delivery of customer value.
- Products development organizations are unable to regularly deliver new and innovative features, because an increasing proportion of effort is spent developing migration and upgrade capabilities for customers who must maintain their own software.
- Service & support organizations are overburdened with the challenge of supporting a wide number of product versions and customer-authored customizations that run in a virtually infinite variety of environments.
Appirio's founders have also held roles where they have led the adoption of on-demand applications for internal use. These efforts reinforced the inherent strengths of a model that better balances the obligations of software vendors and customers. The founders of Appirio strongly believe that on-demand software allows customers to focus more on applications that benefit their business, rather than developing, administering and operating software and hardware.
We are excited and committed to deliver solutions we believe are inherently more sustainable, balance the customer-vendor relationship, and provide more value than on-premise enterprise software.