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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It's the end of the CIO as we know it

CITE World

The role of the Chief Information Officer is changing as fast as the IT landscape. Between BYOD, the tidal wave of big data metrics, the shift to the cloud, cost pressures, and any of the other thousand dozens of things that have shifted in IT over the last decade, the CIO's job is no longer so cut-and-dried.

Last night, I sat in on a debate between Narinder Singh, Chief Strategy Officer of cloud service provider Appirio (and Jay-Z enthusiast - he quoted the rapper several times during the evening), and R. Ray Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO of Constellation Research, as they discussed the changing nature of the C-Suite  in general and the CIO in particular with moderator Chris Preimesberger, editor of eWeek...

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What Your Business Center Can Learn From One Corporate Remodel

Officing Today

There’s a lot of industry buzz about alternative workplace strategies. But what does it look like when companies decide to take the plunge on their own? And what can your business center glean from corporate remodels that tap into the alternative workplace strategy trend?

Appirio, a Bay Area-based startup technology firm that recently relocated its headquarters to downtown San Francisco, is sharing its story. When the firm relocated, it also set up a new officing paradigm designed for the future of work.

Appirio is using a hoteling model of desk space and utilizing large open spaces for group collaboration. Appirio also encourages virtual work. The office allows for about 60 employees at a time, just 10 percent of its 600 global employees. All four of its co-founders work outside the Bay Area.

OfficingToday caught up with Jennifer Taylor, Appirio’s senior vice president of HR, to discuss the company’s alternative workplace strategy, how they executed it, how it has benefited the firm, and more...

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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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Immigration and America’s high-tech industry: The jobs machine

The Economist

... Other companies in tech hubs have opened faraway offices to tap new pools of skilled labour. Appirio, which advises companies on cloud-computing strategies, has opened an office in Indianapolis. “Lots of talented students are hungry for tech jobs, which are rare there,” says Narinder Singh, one of the company’s co-founders, whose parents came to America from India. RingCentral, a Silicon Valley firm that supplies cloud-based phone systems to businesses, has hired 74 staff in an office in Denver that opened in 2011. Vlad Shmunis, the firm’s Ukraine-born founder, says it wanted to be near another big university that could be a source of smart employees...

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Employers: Benefits of a job go beyond pay packets

Financial Times

...Virgin America, an airline serving destinations throughout North America, reconfigured its method of communicating with its 2,700 staff at more than 20 locations.

“We had had an intranet platform for several years but we knew we had to revamp the way we communicated,” says Ben Eye, manager of teammate engagement and communication. “We had to deal with the 90 per cent of teammates [staff] who are remote, so we designed it to foster a sense of involvement.”

The company’s previous platform contained a lot of information but lacked two-way communications so did not make it easy to obtain feedback. It was not mobile-friendly and was proving difficult to maintain.

Working with Appirio, an IT services provider, Virgin America customised the Salesforce “Chatter” platform to allow a merging of social media with business processes. Part of what Virgin America calls its VX Connect platform is devoted to HR topics, including an explanation of the company’s benefits package. It also includes customised forms that allow staff to enrol in a pension plan and apply for medical leave.

Queries can be submitted to members of the benefits team online. “Because the entire department is monitoring what comes in they get an answer more quickly,” explains Mr Eye. “But this is broader than just benefits: it stimulates the level of engagement. We have a very open environment and we see that as our differentiator in the airline industry.”

Ms Wishart says: “Technology allows you to be more effective and targeted in your approach. Communication can be effective without having to go too far in terms of cost.”

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Job applicants and social media: Employers take 'eyes wide shut' approach

MPR News

...Some hire an outside company, such as Social Intelligence or Sterling, to conduct the social media research for them. Others delegate the research to an employee who is not part of the hiring process.

Third parties would then delete from their reports on job candidates any legally sensitive information, like race or age.

That kind of approach may help avoid lawsuits, but it could harm the recruiting process, said Jason Averbook, chief business innovation officer at Appirio, a company that counsels businesses on talent management.

Recruiters and hiring managers need to worry about finding the talent and not obsess over the problems that could come up during the search, Averbook said.

"Do I focus on those 'coulds' and not do it?" he asked. "Or do I focus on the things that are truly going to get me the best people, and deal with the 'coulds' as an exception?"

Averbook said employers in sectors like information technology cannot wall themselves off from social media. They need those avenues to identify talented workers they can poach from other companies. That's because the workers they need aren't seeking new jobs...

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Committing to your developers will help you keep them

VentureBeat

Developers have a reputation.

The word “developer” evokes an image that has become synonymous with someone that writes code. As someone who codes, I am well aware of the most common images and words that people think of when they learn that, yes, I am a developer.

However evolving, these reputations have followed many developers into their day job, and employers end up benefiting solely from the skills that their coders brought to new hire orientation.
In Silicon Valley and elsewhere, developer talent is scarce, particularly for companies that are not “the” social network or named after a fruit. But when companies do find, recruit, and hire the talent, most aren’t taking the right steps to empower their developer talent to learn, grow and thrive.

Few companies truly harness and empower developer talent, but there are a few ways that any company can start...

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When Standard Is Not Enough

Talent Management Magazine 

Technology, which is often seen as this century’s golden child, can also kill competitive advantage. We all tout the benefits that can come from technology — from efficiency to effectiveness in analyzing our data to the “nth” degree, which ensures we measure every nut and bolt that our technology spits out. But while this technology era is truly the golden era for HR — and more importantly for workforce technology — and we can truly measure and monitor the workforce to drive new business results like never before, the same tools that promise all of this value can also make us incredibly lazy.

As the evolution of cloud-based computing has become the norm when selecting talent management technology, so has the practice of implementing the vendors’ built-in best practices. The theory that the software can’t be customized continues to be touted as the biggest advantage since the birth of the computer. For those who have boxed themselves into a corner writing custom code and spending millions of dollars modifying vendor software, the thought of no customization is a sigh of relief. But maybe we as an industry need to land somewhere in the middle...

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PSA software market: Key capabilities, vendor differentiation

SearchITChannel (TechTarget)

...Appirio Inc., a San Francisco-based cloud services provider, has managed its business using PSA since its 2006 launch. The company, which helps clients navigate Salesforce.com andGoogle Apps implementations, built its own PSA system using Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, noted Glenn Weinstein, Appirio's chief information officer.

Weinstein said Appirio decided to create a home-grown system to track its Salesforce and Google consulting activities. Eventually, Appirio commercialized its PSA, listing it on theSalesforce AppExchange. The company then migrated from the home-built PSA to the commercial version.

Appirio sold its PSA offering to FinancialForce.com in 2011. Weinstein said the product business, which grew beyond the company's expectations, proved too much of a diversion from Appirio's cloud services core. The company continues to use the PSA software, which is now called FinancialForce PSA.

"Other than email, it is our most mission-critical system," Weinstein said.

...Appirio's Weinstein said PSA solutions, over time, have pushed forward into sales and marketing while becoming more tightly integrated into back-end financial systems. At Appirio, FinancialForce PSA ties into not only Salesforce.com, but also Workday Inc.'s financial management application...

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Appirio: Crowdsourcing crucial for scaling cloud projects

ZDNet

With more than 500 enterprise cloud customers to its name, San Francisco-based Appirio is one of the better-known players in the cloud integrator community, even though it only employs about 600 people outright. But co-founder and chief strategy officer Narinder Singh knows he can't compete with legacy integrators like Accenture with his on-staff numbers, which is why his company created the CloudSpokes crowdsourced development platform almost two years ago.

When ZDNet contributor Dennis Howlett chatted with Singh last fall, there were approximately 50,000 developers participating in the community. When I caught up with him two weeks ago, that number had eclipsed 73,000.

If you haven't read ZDNet's past coverage about CloudSpokes, the idea is for enterprises to use the site to help develop specific applications that plug in to broader platforms by running challenges to see what already exists and might be reusable. More than 600 challenges have been completed so far.

"You know somewhere in the world that someone else did something like what you need, maybe even just last week," Singh said.

The original plan was to use CloudSpokes as a supplement to Appirio's own resources, but a healthy development community has built up around several well-known cloud platforms, including Salesforce.com, Box and DocuSign, he said. That visibility reflects positively on Appirio...

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Q&A: General Atlantic's Rochkind explains big bets on Box, Appirio, more

Silicon Valley Business Journal

...Appirio is a business that's been ramping very quickly. They've done some acquisitions. Most recently they bought a company in the East Bay called Knowledge Infusion to expand their practice.

It’s got a great management team with Chris Barbin and Narinder Singh. We only back existing strong managers. We love the guys at Box, too, with Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith and Dan Levin. So that's where it starts.

Then we were able to develop a partnership relationship with them where we could be very helpful to pursue some M&A targets that Appirio wanted to pursue. We were helpful in doing due diligence and in getting those deals done.

In addition we've been very helpful with introducing them to some of those Global 2000 and Fortune 500 companies we work with. So it’s been just a great partnership for a business that this year will do over $100 million in revenue and is growing very quickly, expanding globally wanting to get these large customers. It was a situation where we could invest just over $50 million of capital. So it's just sizeable enough for us to spend our time on. And they really believed in and believe in our value proposition, how we would differentiate from traditional venture capital money...

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Ignore Cloud Security Assessment at Your Own Risk

CIO

...Budget practices and economics also play a role in limiting SaaS testing. Glenn Weinstein, co-founder and CIO at Appirio, a cloud services provider based in San Francisco, says IT organizations may lack a formal budget line item for SaaS testing and instead rely on the vendor to provide security. "It's still not top of mind in the budgeting process. You don't see it broken out as a separate line of the security budget."

There Are No Dumb Cloud Security Questions

Just because an enterprise lacks a formal SaaS testing budget doesn't mean it isn't asking security questions, Weinstein notes. He's seen IT security teams invest significant time with cloud vendors as part of the RFP process.

As a cloud service brokerage, Weinstein says Appirio fields client security questions. The company defers some inquires to the SaaS vendor involved in a particular customer engagement-questions regarding infrastructure, data centers and the layers of security around a given application, for example.

Appirio, meanwhile, directly addresses questions related to its own security process, Weinstein notes. The company, or its business partners, may need to access a SaaS application on the customer's behalf. This means clients are interested in how Appirio protects data from internal breaches.

Specifically, customers may ask how the company handles data in transit, or in the development environment, or when it is passed among consulting partners, Weinstein notes, adding that customers continue to grapple with what to ask of their cloud providers. "We are in the very early days," he says, "and the types of questions that customers ask about the cloud...will continue to change."

If anything, Weinstein would like to see more probing questions from customers. "We still see a lot of questions aimed at considerations that are pretty well shored up at this point."

An RFP might ask cloud vendors about penetration testing or distributed denial of service vulnerability, but Weinstein says the top enterprise providers have those issues well in hand. He'd prefer to see RFPs ask about configuration security, authentication options, and the provider's ability to control access to data among employees and third parties. He suggests that those questions more closely address the security surrounding cloud applications....

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Crowdsourcing Developers To Connect Apps Using Appirio CloudSpokes

TechCrunch

Appirio has launched a new partner program for connecting cloud apps through CloudSpokes, its 72,000-member developer community. Apps increasingly need to connect to offer a workflow that can appeal to an application's user base.

The CloudSpokes partner program allows for companies to create their own spokes that act as networks for doing contests that developers participate in.

Smartsheet, a collaborative project-management tool with a spreadsheet-type app, ran a contest to create a connection with Salesforce.com. Updates from Salesforce.com are pulled into Smartsheet, which serves as the master document for managing a sales-lead pipeline.

The contest gave experts in Salesforce.com's technology a chance to see how the Smartsheet API functions. It also gave a way to improve the Smartsheet service in a way that would have potentially meant more investment in developer talent.

Crowdsourcing can represent an obvious cost advantage. It splits the development into different tasks, helping mollify recruiting costs...

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AppExchange Seven Years On

Enterprise Irregulars

"The AppExchange is undoubtedly a significant portion of what makes salesforce.com unique. Pre-integrated solutions dramatically reduce the cost to the customer to extend the capabilities of Salesforce and the fact that it has already gone through growing pains means it will take other providers years to mimic its capability and impact." ~Narinder Singh, co-founder and CSO, Appirio.

Nine years ago I wrote The New Garage. It was a thought piece that tried to peer into the future of Software as a Service (SaaS) and make some predictions from a business and economics perspective. Salesforce had recently started promoting its platform in the making (then called S-Force) and encouraging third parties to develop applications that complemented and extended the basic Salesforce CRM solution so there was no reason to speculate about the impact this new approach would have.

But also, the history of business and industry is a long story of better, faster and cheaper and at that moment all three were all in the driver's seat. Back office software had already demonstrated many business process improvements leveraging automation and the Internet, and I thought it was time to turn some of these techniques on software. SaaS was a good start but it had further to go, I thought...

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Cornerstone launches Salesforce native application

ZDNet

Cornerstone OnDemand launched Cornerstone for Salesforce, which is designed to offer talent management tools build directly into Salesforce's platform.

Specifically, Cornerstone, which just forged a partnership with Appirio, will offer training programs that can be tailored and delivered via Salesforce. Cornerstone is hoping to use Salesforce as a channel to deliver its social educational content. The company said its efforts complement Salesforce's Work.com efforts.

Cornerstone has more than 10 million subscribers to its learning and talent management tools. Cornerstone for Salesforce integrates with Chatter, Service Cloud, and partner portals...

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Virgin America used Salesforce Chatter to revamp its ancient intranet, and employees love it

CITE World

...Virgin America's mission is to "make flying good again," and that means a rock star experience for customers.

But for Virgin America's employees, that showmanship didn't always translate to the behind-the-scenes intranet experience. It took VXConnect, a custom employee portal built by systems integrator Appirio on top of the Salesforce.com Chatter social platform, to unify the airline's cross-continental workforce under the company's banner, says Amy Cisneroz, Program Manager at Virgin America.

Most of Virgin America's 2,700 employees operate remotely from the airline's Burlingame, CA headquarters -- working as gate agents, pilots and flight attendants all over the country (and beyond). Getting documentation, company resources, or essentially any information to this remote workforce required the use of an ugly, eight-year-old content management system (CMS) that only pushed data out, never pulled it in, and which was a pain to use besides, Cisneroz says.

Worst of all, there wasn't even a rudimentary mobile version of this intranet, meaning that Virgin America employees couldn't so much as log in from their smartphones and tablets.

Cisneroz's background in acting as a liaison between IT and management made her the natural choice to oversee the modernization of Virgin America's intranet -- which meant getting a full-immersion course in the cloud. When Cisneroz first joined Virgin America in mid-2011, she jokes that all she knew about the matter was that "clouds were in the sky."

She consulted both executives and employees alike, trying to get a sense for what they expected from an employee portal. Even Verizon, a Virgin America business partner, had some input on how best to go about it. Predictably, the major theme was that everybody wanted access from their iPhones and Android phones, in addition to a generally more user-friendly experience.

The company audited solutions from social business provider Jive and human resources management solution developer Saba Systems, but Virgin America executives eventually decided to purchase licenses for Salesforce.com Chatter, the SaaS giant's much-touted social enterprise platform (perhaps not a huge surprise, given Sir Richard Branson's friendly relationship with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff).

Interestingly, Microsoft SharePoint was barely even considered for this undertaking. Cisneroz says that the team was looking for something really new and cool -- tapping Microsoft for this project would hardly be worth the effort of replacing the legacy CMS.

"Everything we do is big and over the top," Cisneroz says, and going with the established marketplace leader for internal collaboration would be too much like following the herd for Virgin America's taste.

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Appirio outlines 2013 focus; Eyes HCM as springboard

ZDNet

Appirio, a cloud integration and consulting firm, outlined its 2013 plans and indicated that it plans to use its human capital management focus as a springboard to new implementations in mobile, CRM and collaboration.

The company on Thursday outlined a deal to make Cornerstone OnDemand as its preferred talent management partner. That partnership, along with the acquisition of Knowledge Infusion, has made Appirio the go-to cloud HCM integration outfit.

Not surprisingly, Appirio's 2013 focus areas break down like this:

• Expand the HCM practice and make "people-based processes less tactical and more transformational -- across every functional area." In HCM, Appirio is pushing Workday and Cornerstone. According to Cornerstone CEO Adam Miller, speaking on a November earnings conference call, his company is a partner with Workday, but may tread on co-opetition. Appirio will have to be Switzerland should those two partners wind up duking it out.
• Appirio will take CloudSpokes, its community and cloud platform, and extend it more to independent software vendors.
• The company aims to bring more analytics and metrics to customers.
• And add global development centers around the world to support its core efforts as well as "a growing number of CRM, HCM, collaboration and mobile-focused customer engagements."

In a nutshell, Appirio plans to take its HCM focus into other areas...

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Appirio's next steps in HCM

#evilplans

Yesterday's announcement that Appirio is partnering with Cornerstone OnDemand as its preferred solution for talent management should not come as a surprise, following Appirio's recent acquisition of Knowledge Infusion, a specialist HCM consultancy.

On a pre-briefing call, Jason Corsello, VP corporate development and strategy at Cornerstone said: "In the past, we have done most of the hands on deployments ourselves. We can't scale at the rate we need to so this partnership comes at the right time. Knowledge Infusion are the biggest and best HR cloud services providers. We have 30 percent of the business in international plus we are expanding into the Asia-Pacific region where Appirio is already strong."

What may not be well known is that in a past life, Corsello was a senior executive with Knowledge Infusion so it doesn't take too much imagination to understand how the logic of this deal comes together. How it works out going forward is another matter...

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Appirio, Cornerstone OnDemand Team To Extend Cloud-Based HCM

CRN

Cloud provider Appirio on Thursday said it has partnered with Cornerstone OnDemand, a software-as-a-service human capital management (HCM) company, to broaden its talent management portfolio.

Cloud-based talent management, which includes human resources and other business management resources, has become a hot market, in which Appirio intends to take a strong position.

The partnership follows and builds on Appirio's acquisition last October of HCM provider Knowledge Infusion, for an undisclosed amount.

"We are seeing more engagement in large-scale transformation efforts, not just involving human resources, but sales and services. So, Cornerstone OnDemand is a natural extension." Narinder Singh, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Appirio, said in an interview with CRN.

Appirio will become Cornerstone OnDemand's preferred service provider and work with Cornerstone’s clients to build talent and learning management applications. Appirio’s existing HCM portfolio includes recruiting, onboarding, human resources, performance management, learning management and employee engagement, the company said....

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Cornerstone OnDemand, Appirio forge HCM pact

ZDNet

Appirio, which acquired Knowledge Infusion to bulk up its practice, will be the preferred service provider for Cornerstone's talent management tools.

Cornerstone OnDemand, a human capital management software as a service provider, has forged a deal with Appirio, a consulting firm focused on cloud deployments.

Under the deal, Appirio, which acquired Knowledge Infusion to bulk up its practice, will be the preferred service provider for Cornerstone's talent management tools.

The partnership will expand Appirio's human capital management efforts. Cornerstone gets services help, distribution and high-level engagements.

In a statement, Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio, said Cornerstone is complementary to his company's HCM plans. Adam Miller, CEO of Cornerstone, said the partnership will put Appirio's cloud experience will help his customers...

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Salesforce.com Apps Unify JDRF Diabetes Fund-Raising Records

eWEEK

...JDRF, a nonprofit organization focused on type 1 diabetes research, is using cloud computing to create a single location to track 5 million donor records. Since its founding in 1970, JDRF has raised more than $1.6 billion for its research on type 1 diabetes.

Before migrating to the cloud, JDRF would take all donations in cash and on paper, James Szmak, chief operating officer at JDRF, told eWEEK.

The cloud has substantially increased the fund-raising capabilities for JDRF, according to Szmak. Now the organization can contact potential donors through email instead of through postal services and take payments by credit card instead of cash and checks, he said.

Operating its applications in the cloud also allows JDRF to "run an IT shop in a very low-cost manner and put the requirements on the vendors," he said.

JDRF uses Convio Luminate, an engagement application from BlackBaud, on Salesforce's customer-relationship-management platform to manage fund-raising activities, communicate with donors and analyze constituent transactions. The organization also uses a budget and forecast system from Adaptive Planning.

In addition, a cloud-based application from Greater Giving allows the JDRF to manage auctions and track attendees to fund-raising galas, said Szmak.

The cloud enables JDRF to organize all of its records into a single platform and avoid duplication of its 5.5 million donor records, Szmak explained.

Cloud service provider Appirio is the chief integrator that allows JDRF to bring these multiple cloud applications together under one Salesforce platform, he said....

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With $1 Trillion at Stake, Enterprise Technology Gets Its Star Turn

WIRED

...But here’s why you should care about the latest enterprise software or services outfit knocking on your company’s door. Every 10 to 15 years the enterprise market goes through an upheaval where the next generation of technology replaces the old. We’re in the early stages of one of those big displacements right now, where huge companies are brought to their knees, and new giants are born.

The technology trends driving it are things we read about daily, the cloud and big data. But the reason it happens with such ferocity in the corporate world, is that unlike the consumer world, the enterprise market is a zero-sum game. There is only so much budget to go around. That means for every sale that some new hotshot company makes, some other company loses a sale.

The last time it happened was from 1990 to 2000, when companies like PeopleSoft, Business Objects, SAP, Oracle, Sybase even Microsoft grabbed share and saw their sales and market value balloon. Today it’s happening again with companies like Appirio, Box, GoodData, Jive, Netsuite, Palo Alto Networks, Okta, Service Now, Splunk and others gunning for companies like EMC, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and IBM...

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Why Mobile MUST be Part of Your HR Software Strategy

i-Sight

If you're not incorporating mobile into your business strategy, you might as well pack up your shingle now. The workforce of the future will incorporate mobile into everyday functions, and it won't be up to companies to decide whether or not to ride the wave. Those that don't will simply die off.

That's the message that Jason Averbook, Chief Business Innovation Officer at Appirio wants to send loud and clear. Averbook warns that HR departments need to become more outward focused and embrace mobile technology as part of HR software solutions now to be ready for the day when five generations of workers will be in the workforce, with the younger generations expecting to use the technology that they have grown up with.

Averbook talks about his eight-year old and five-year old children who are already making videos and getting their homework off websites. When they enter the workforce in 10 or 15 years, that's the way they are going to expect work, says Averbook. "They are not going to want to use desktops and laptops, they are going to want to use a tablet," he says.

"In 10 years that's where the world's going to be. There's no question. So, that being said, what do I do, as an HR function, to prepare? If my technology is such that people have to be in the office to use it, that's not going to work."

HR departments need to plan now to avoid being left behind. Hear what Jason Averbook has to say about the importance of mobile and collaborative technology for the future of business and why human resources departments need to prepare for the next Y2K...

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The 10 Must-Have Sales and Marketing Business Tools

Huffington Post

...In 2012, InformationWeek named one of the top 500 innovators and rule breakers of business technology. My company's CIO Dan Petlon was ranked 80th on the list for his game changing use of enterprise applications to drive business growth. In addition, Boston Business Journal named Petlon one of the top 10 CIOs in Boston.

Here are the 10 indispensable marketing and sales tools for you to consider, per Dan Petlon:

CloudFactor. CloudFactor is a very cool integration tool for Salesforce to Google integration. It provides context sensitive data from Salesforce right in your Gmail client. Without leaving Gmail you can see Salesforce contact, account, case, and opportunity info. There is also a contact syncing component to keep your Google and Salesforce contacts in sync. CloudFactor saves our sales force time as they are corresponding with our customers, they can quickly see current information as well as log the current conversation to the customer record in Salesforce.com....

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A Silver Lining In Every Cloud: Applying Time, Talent & Tech for Business & Social Good

Business4Better

Making homemade blankets for those in need and delivering high-impact business technology solutions are worlds apart at first blush. At Appirio, a global midsize Cloud Technology solutions company, they are one in the same, shaping how Appirio does business and serves the communities in which their employees and customers live and work.

“Doing good to do good” is the way Appirio looks at their business model and approach. As a growing company with 600+ employees, Appirio uses their employee time, talent, and company’s technology know-how to make a difference in the communities they serve. The leadership team sees community engagement, partnerships, and volunteering as the connective tissue that shapes their culture and brings together their employees, customers, and partners to create business success and community impact success. And, while it feels good to contribute, it is an effective tool to help the organization recruit and retain top talent in a competitive market, differentiate their brand and company, and open doors to meet other people who shape business opportunities.

The backbone of this corporate responsibility effort is an initiative called “Silver Lining.” Kicked off just 3 short years ago, Appirio’s Silver Lining Program was created to mobilize its employees to make a measurable impact on the communities in which they work and live. Inspired in part by community benefit programs created by technology partners like Salesforce.com and Google, the Silver Lining program was launched in 2010 through the passion of Appirio employees who have made giving back part of their personal and professional lives. The program’s keeper of the flame is Kim Arden, Appirio’s Community Engagement Manager.

Business alignment is one of the keys to success of any Corporate Responsibility and Employee Engagement program. “Cloud Technology, by its very nature, provides access to people, resources, and information that is both affordable and scalable,”said Narinder Singh, chief strategy officer, Appirio. “While it is not critical that Cloud Technology be at the center of all our community initiatives, it provides a powerful inflection point with the everyday heroes at organizations we work with, including JDRF, Architecture for Humanity, and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. At Appirio, we understand that we have to live up to the responsibility of our good fortune and take small steps that hold ourselves and the organizations we work for accountable to do more to help."...

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CRM Watchlist 2013: It all starts...now. The Finalists

ZDNet

...For the novices out there, the CRM Watchlist has been around 5 years as of 2013. It’s an award designed to single out technology companies that will have a significant impact in the coming year in the market with customers, and in the industry they represent.  It skews to the larger companies rather than the smaller companies simply because larger more established companies have a better chance to win because they can afford to do those things that have an impact more so than small companies can.  However, small companies are definitely in the mix and thus are often among the winners – because they wow me with their stuff and they tend to flow with the trends in the market....

...This is just a list of the finalists, not the winners.  That will be soon enough. Be patient, grasshoppers.   These lists are in alphabetical order. There are several categories.  The two major categories (both of which are weighted differently) are Vendors and Consulting Companies/Systems Integrators....

Consulting/Systems Integrators

Roughly a little less than half of the consulting/systems integrator entries qualified as finalists.

1. Accenture
2. Appirio
3. CSC
4. DRI Consulting
5. Ernst & Young Advisory
6. Innoveer
7. ITC Infotech
8. Solvis Consulting
9. The Pedowitz Group

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How the Cloud Changes Software Consulting

The New York Times

...Software can be deployed and updated faster in cloud systems because of the central control. If you make changes to a calendar function, for example, or patch a potential security flaw, it can show up on everyone’s machines the next time they log in.

You can also change the way that other programmers and consultants approach work. Appirio, based in New York, is attempting to build a crowdsourced method of writing custom business software applications. Called CloudSpokes , it involves companies submitting “challenges” in exchange for cash rewards. Programmers from around the world can compete to write the best software, possibly winning jobs as well as money.

“Companies pay for the top one or two submissions, but they get to look at multiple versions of the work,” said Narinder Singh, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Appirio. His company often gets a commission for managing the work, and can more easily spot talent around the globe. “You aren’t paying for labor before you have a sense of the person’s skills,” he said. The system also works for designers, he said. Much the way Cloud Sherpas sells Salesforce as well as Google, Appirio is increasingly selling more software from Workday, another cloud-based software company.

The new approaches to consulting underline how much collaboration figures in cloud technology. Google is gaining traction partly because its products have better features; even more important, traditional enterprises have come to accept cloud-based systems, and workers are used to communicating constantly, thanks in part to the habits of “sharing” information over Facebook and Twitter...

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HR In The Cloud: Allowing For A Connected Workplace

Forbes

Guest post written by Jason Averbook. Jason Averbook is chief business inovation officer of Knowledge Infusion, a unit of Appirio.

Many of us would describe ourselves as digitally connected to our personal lives. We know what our friends are up to (and what they had for lunch) in near real time. Often the books we read, music we listen to, products we buy and even relationships we enter into are fed to us from the cloud, based on our habits and preferences. As a culture, for better or worse, we are becoming "plugged into" or connected to our own lives.

Yet as employees, many of us can't say the same about our workplaces. Without question, organizations are improving when it comes to accommodating a virtual workforce, as most have accepted the idea that employees can work efficiently from anywhere. However, the impetus for employees working from home or a remote office is often rooted in company-centric benefits like cost savings, productivity gains, or access to global talent.

To support these virtual factions of workers, HR is compelled to provide ways for remote employees to connect with headquarters. What's often still missing is giving thought to connecting employees with one another. The notion that "face time" equals being "plugged in" at work is still prevalent, but cloud technology is changing that. And let's face it: even those who work in a physical office daily would probably claim that their manager and co-workers don't know exactly what they're working on, past/current project contributions, newly acquired skills, or career interests. Likewise, most employees would tell you they aren't really sure how their day-to-day activities are contributing to the organization's mission or business goals. Being connected isn't necessarily a matter of proximity...

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Cloud Service Brokerages Emerge As New Integrators

CIO

When the Museum of Modern Art in New York took on two cloud projects, it decided to reach outside the organization for some extra help.

MoMA sought to migrate from its on-premises email system to a Google-hosted environment and adopt Salesforce.com's CRM offering to gain more insight into donors and members. MoMA CTO Juan Montes read up on Appirio, a San Francisco-based services provider, after receiving a tip that the company was "a vendor with cloud chops." A meeting with Appirio's CEO sealed the deal: The museum tapped Appirio for guidance on both the Gmail and Salesforce deployments.

Montes cited Appirio's cloud expertise and specialized tooling as factors in its selection. "In the case of Gmail, they had the tools and methods to take information as it was in the on-premise context and port it to a cloud context," he says. "It would have been very difficult for us to develop those tools in a timely way. It would have been very costly to us. They had the tools and the know-how and were ready to go and we could do the implementation in a very short period of time."..

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'Workforce Technology' Combines Tech, HR Strategies

Enterprise Conversation

...Though he continues to be listed as the CEO of Knowledge Infusion, the company he co-founded is being acquired by Appirio, a cloud applications provider for IT, finance, and HR. Now Averbook, one of the most outspoken advocates of maintaining human initiative, human capital, and human decision making in an organization, is being retitled chief business innovation officer for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.

How does Averbook reconcile his vision of human capital management with the rising tide of cloud-based services automation?

He said his vision is based on an evolving concept he calls "workforce technology." For the past two decades, organizations have developed a "people strategy" and then searched for whatever packaged software fit that vision. (Averbook speaks as a PeopleSoft veteran.)

Somewhere between the time when they sit for the demo -- and ooh and aah and drool over the robotic nature of this artificially intelligent software -- and when it gets implemented and "goes live," when they have their big party, that chasm between the two becomes gigantic.

These people strategies tend to deteriorate over this widening interval. HR departments sacrifice elements of their vision in the interest of implementing what they can, cutting their losses, and expediting their go-live time. "If that's the approach, pure implementation, you almost never get to the strategic level," Averbook said.

Most HR departments in the past [thought] of everything as a science. The big reason HR departments came into existence was a) for compliance purposes, and b) to be able to do compensation and payroll, which had to be done to the penny. Talent management is never going to be a science. Talent management is an art. Art is a combination of data and a strategy of where the organization is trying to go....

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Advisory services: Businesses turn to brokers to get more from the cloud

The Financial Times

...Companies want brokers to help them get more out of their disparate cloud software programmes. Mr Nucci says: "To do any analysis on these services you need to integrate them. Let's say you want to analyse whether your hiring strategy is working. You need to touch at least three or four different systems, including human resources and payroll."

The trouble is, the cloud-based human resources system will not necessarily talk to your in-house payroll programme, without either some complex internal engineering or the help of an external expert.

Such help is not cheap. Appirio says companies can pay between $10,000 and single-digit millions for help in making the transition and in running the cloud system subsequently.

However, Chris Barbin, chief executive at Appirio, says this is less than companies would have spent in the past on IT contractors who would spend three to five years designing an IT transformation project that would often fail. The results of transferring IT to the cloud are quicker and come in increments that can be tested along the way. Changes, even at big companies, can be made in four to six weeks or less...

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Management: Caution needed over decision to migrate

The Financial Times

...Indeed, some companies, particularly those most recently founded, already do everything on the cloud.

"We don't own a single server and we never plan to," says Chris Barbin, the chief executive of Appirio, based in San Francisco.

Given that Appirio is a company that offers other businesses help in moving to the cloud, this stance is perhaps not surprising. But the cloud does give the 600-person business an enviable agility.

Mr Barbin says: "We acquired a company and, on the day the acquisition was announced, we had all the staff from the acquired company already up on our internal social networking system. In the old days you couldn't even requisition a server in less than a few weeks."...

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Salesforce.com's Complexity Brings CIOs, Partners Together

CIO

...The business-critical nature of some Salesforce.com deployments also contributes to the need for partnering. A SaaS deployment may simply focus on the application, with little or no need for professional services. However, Salesforce.com deployments don't always exist in isolation. They are often embedded in broader projects to revamp sales or customer service in a department or across an organization.

K12, a company that provides online K-12 education, fits that model. The organization decided to replace its legacy customer system as part of an effort to provide a more personal and relevant customer experience, according to Dianne Conley, vice president of marketing systems at K12. The company selected Salesforce.com over Oracle as its software provider; Salesforce.com recommended Appirio, a San Francisco-based services provider specializing in the cloud, as an implementation partner.

K12 planned to hire a partner for the project, whether the nod went to Salesforce.com or Oracle. "It wasn't even something we thought twice about for an undertaking on the scale we were doing," Conley says...

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Kindred Healthcare Empowers Sales Reps With iPads And Salesforce.com

Forbes

Sales executive Barry Somervell has a passion for arming his team with tools that yield productivity; he believes in the power of technology to transform the selling process. Barry was asked to come into Kindred Healthcare, a $5 billion supplier of post-acute-care services, to energize and modernize its nursing center division's sales process to bring patients into its 224 skilled nursing and transitional care centers. Barry quickly saw that the tools that the "clinical liaisons" carried were lacking. This group of sales professionals, from a clinical or nursing background, needed better ways to collaborate with colleagues and with hospital medical staff to offer the right services to patients about to be discharged and in need of rehabilitation services. You can see Barry and his team in this video.

The problems were subtle but persistent. Even when powered by salesforce.com, Windows Slate computers didn't cut it -- the poor connectivity and awkwardness of the device interfered with good engagement with hospital staff and patients and their families. The sales resources were largely paper-based and inconsistently applied. The results of a meeting were often lost in a morass of documentation done online in the evenings from home, resulting in lost sales, missed opportunities to share and learn, and a data vacuum that prevented management from knowing what was wrong and how to fix it.

The team was determined to find a solution and decided to find the best technology to drive collaborative engagement with the discharge planners responsible for getting patients onto the next phase of their recovery and rehabilitation, engage directly with patients and their families through video and rich media, and make each sales interaction a resource to be mined for insight and improvement.

But which tools would make this group of sales reps successful? That's what the sales and marketing collaboration council wanted to know in their monthly planning meeting. This steering committee, 15 people strong, is headed by the president and staffed by sales, marketing, field operations, and IT.

The answer, created by cloud integrator Appirio, was to use a smart combination of iPads for engagement; salesforce.com for content access, contacts, and sales process and analysis; Cisco WebEx for training; email for collaboration; and MobileIron for tablet security and app management.

Appirio worked with Barry and his core sales operations team for managing the salesforce.com environment and doing the analytics, with the IT department for device management, with the marketing team for content creation and porting, and with the regional sales directors to drive adoption, use, and collaboration....

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Why the CIO Must Give Up Something for the Greater Good

The Wall Street Journal

A CIO once told me that it's impossible to be perceived as strategic when you're person the CEO calls when email isn't working. The quote stuck with me for a reason beyond his specific predicament. Software, in the words of venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, "Is Eating the World". So, in this time of disruption and downward pressure on costs, how can a CIO manage commoditized technologies and also be responsible for making technology a key part of every business strategy?

For the most part, the answer is that the CIO can't. The skills, approaches, tools, and executive qualities required to drive operational aspects of commodity IT services are different, if not antithetical, to driving strategic use of technology for competitive market differentiation. Instead CEOs should look to split the role into two. The first drives commoditized technology improvements, basing performance on cost reduction and maintenance of service levels. While it's possible to do this in innovative ways, the ultimate goal is to allow for investment to shift towards more impactful technology that directly drives the business...

Read more here

...Narinder Singh is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Appirio

Dilbert disses cloud (or at least cloudwashing)

GigaOM

When Dilbert takes aim at cloudwashing, maybe it is the beginning of the end for that annoying practice which threatens the credibility of tech companies.

Dilbert’s boss (he of the awesome two-point hairdo) tells Dilbert to move some of the company’s functions to the Internet but to call the Internet “cloud.” Why? Because no one “will take us seriously unless we’re doing something in the cloud,” says Mr. Two-Points, aka PHB or Pointy-headed Boss. The remedy is to apply mindless jargon to what they’re already doing. This has been the practice of 95 percent of software companies for the past few years –put out an update and call it “cloud.”

Last year, Appirio inaugurated a “Cloudwashies” contest to give the most shameless perpetrators of cloudwashing the dubious acknowledgement they so richly deserved. Oracle and its CEO Larry Ellison — whose miraculous “come-to-cloud” conversion made him the no brainer choice — were winners. So were Salesforce.com and Microsoft — for it’s beyond-irritating “to the cloud” ads. (InformationWeek has its own take here.)

Knowledge Infusion Takes Next Step

Human Resource Executive Online

...KI has long been a Workday consulting and advisory partner; new owner Appirio, an implementation partner. Together they will have strategy and technology covered in The Cloud. Vendor agnostic to the end, KI has recently become a deployment partner for SuccessFactors and Salesforce.com's Work.com, as well.

Says Corsello, once KI's No. 3, "What made KI unique is that they got to know their clients' business and help build their HR and talent management strategy from there. Most others just focus on the technology. Appirio has quickly become the Accenture of the Cloud world and, by all indications, appears to be a great match."

KI plans to expand its brief under Appirio with Heidi building a people-centric, work-centric practice across the other corporate domains besides HR, including marketing and customer relationship management (CRM).

Appirio beefs up, acquires Knowledge Infusion

ZDNet

Appirio on Monday said it will acquire Knowledge Infusion in a deal aimed at implementing cloud-based human capital management software at a broader scale.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

The news, which should be good for companies like Workday and Salesforce, will create an organization with 600 consultants. Appirio has specialized in cloud and software as a service deployments. Knowledge Infusion has primarily focused on the HCM market.

Looking for the 'Next Big Thing'? Ranking the Top 50 Start-Ups

The Wall Street Journal

Venture capitalists are still investing in flashy Internet start-ups, but the "Next Big Thing" is more likely to be a maker of humdrum Internet plumbing for businesses.

The Wall Street Journal's third annual ranking of the top 50 venture-capital-backed companies shows a crop of contenders that overall are focused less on online consumers than in years past.

The top three ranked companies are all business-product makers: Genband Inc., a supplier of voice-over-Internet-protocol technology to telecom companies; Xirrus Inc., a provider of wireless networking equipment; and Tabula Inc., which makes semiconductors for electronic products.

Several other companies on the list offer products or services designed to help businesses run more efficiently, such as data-storage company Nimble Storage Inc. (No. 26) and business-analytics software provider Marketo Inc. (No. 20), cloud-computing services provider Appirio Inc. (No. 29)...

5 ways to think like a cloud architect

ZDNet

In a new post, Chris Bruzzi and Nick Hamm, both with Appirio, a cloud services provider, share their experiences in cloud application development. They point to the five changes in mindset that needs to take place as application development and deployment evolves to the cloud world.

For architects and developers who have been working within the service-oriented architecture realm, most of these best practices will look terribly familiar. But Bruzzi and Hamm point out that SOA in the past was more constrained, since it typically stopped at the enterprise walls. Now, as more and more of IT gets hooked up into the cloud, it's time to really promote "service-oriented" thinking...

The State of Social Media at Work In One Quick Infographic

Forbes

After surveying over 300 professionals, technology service provider Appirio determined that most people are far more social personally than they are at work.

Interestingly, 41% believe their company should be doing more to become a social enterprise, and twice as many managers are using social media compared to their employees they manage. So the takeaway here seems to be that employees either are not allowed to engage in social networking activities at work, or don't see the value in it.

Most importantly, as the survey suggests, enterprise workers now understand that culture and ownership of the social business transformation are key factors to the success of a social enterprise. That's a welcome shift from past surveys I have seen.

Appirio on the state of social at work: It needs more time

ZDNet

As Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference continues this week, Appirio has released a new report examining the state of social technologies in the workplace.

The bottom line is that the social enterprise/revolution/whatever-you-want-to-call-it concept has a long way to go before it is consider the de facto way of doing business.

Before that can happen, the concept of social enterprise might need to be defined better as a recent Bluewolf survey also concluded that many businesses still don't understand what this means exactly.

Overall, Appirio's results concur with those of Bluewolf. For example, nearly a third of businesses surveyed had no idea what the term "social enterprise" meant.

That doesn't mean that businesses aren't on-board with the idea of integrating social media throughout work infrastructures. Researchers found that more than 35 percent of respondents said their companies had set aside budgets or resources to make business processes more social. Furthermore, 57 percent of respondents said they currently use social tools to do their job.

Appirio's CloudSpokes: an update

ZDNet

Apart from the fact that Appirio puts on by far the best party at Dreamforce, it also happens to be one of the real disrupters in the SI market. One of the ways it does this is through the CloudSpokes community. In this 4:04 minute video, co-founder Narinder Singh talks through how the company is going about disrupting cloud implementation and development consulting.

This is impressive by any standards. Off camera, Singh said the company has taken its foot off the gas a little bit as it manages community growth. Of greater interest to me was the Singh's claim that on certain projects, it doesn't make sense to use Appirio's own development teams but to turn the project over to CloudSpokes with Appirio maintaining a watching brief.

He gave the example of one project where CloudSpokes brought the project in at a significant reduction to the fully loaded cost that Appirio would have needed to charge but at higher margin. "We believe that if you're going to disrupt the SI market then you have to apply it to yourself in order for it to make sense. We're doing that by putting our own work into challenges. It's producing better results for us and customers. It's a genuine win-win," said Singh.

I asked about engagement given that of the reported 50,000 members it seems that there have only been some 2,600 submitted entries. "You've got to remember that developers sign up for communities for more than one reason. Money certainly helps but they like to learn from their peers. Despite what the numbers suggest, when we take out the skewed results. the median number of entries per challenge is four. That's four different ideas per challenge. We think that's pretty good going...