It's India meets Indianapolis: Bangalore-based consulting firm Wipro is buying Appirio for US$500 million to bulk up its cloud applications business.
With more resources behind it, cloud services vendor Appirio will be in a better position to fight back against big consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte, which "have garnered disproportionate market share" in the cloud services market in recent years, Appirio CEO Chris Barbin wrote in a blog post explaining the deal.
Appirio, based in Indianapolis, offers a range of cloud applications integration services, many of them built around Salesforce.com -- a logical fit since it grew out of Salesforce's AppExchange startup incubator. The 10-year-old company also partners with Workday, Google and Amazon Web Services, and numbers Facebook, eBay and Coca-Cola among its customers.
Wipro plans to fold its existing cloud applications businesses, also built on Salesforce and Workday, into its acquisition, operating them all under the Appirio brand, which Barbin will continue to lead, the companies said Thursday.
Last year Wipro reported that over 1,000 consultants from its 170,000-strong workforce were dedicated to its Salesforce practice.
Appirio has a total of 1,250 employees worldwide, although it claims to represent the services of a million more. These are the designers, developers and data scientists who sell their services through the freelance marketplace TopCoder that it acquired in 2013, folding its own Cloudspokes marketplace into it.
TopCoder too will remain a distinct brand within Wipro, TopCoder CEO Mike Morris wrote on the business unit's blog.
The companies hope to close the deal by year-end.