September 17, 2013 : The combination of Topcoder and Appirio's crowdsourcing community, CloudSpokes, accelerates Appirio's disruption of the legacy IT services industry with nearly 600,000 of the world's best developers and designers
San Francisco – Sept. 17, 2013 – Appirio, a global cloud services provider, today announced that it has acquired Topcoder, which creates the world's largest professional development and design community. By combining Topcoder's global capacity and design capability with CloudSpokes' expertise in cloud and advanced web technologies, Appirio and its customers now have access to nearly 600,000 of the world's best developers, designers and data analytics experts. Together, the communities bring a sophisticated technology platform to enable crowdsourcing as a core part of the next generation of services.
"Appirio has embraced community development since the company's inception, and has proven that crowdsourcing is an effective way to increase innovation and more cost-effectively deliver solutions," said Chris Barbin, co-founder and CEO, Appirio. "The rise of the sharing economy is quickly rendering the traditional systems integration and offshore biased model obsolete. Together, the CloudSpokes and Topcoder communities offer more elastic development and design resources than Accenture, Deloitte and InfoSys combined."
Since creating the CloudSpokes community in 2011, Appirio has proven the community model's effectiveness with its own customers. A recent analyst report cites that crowdsourced development can spur innovation, lower costs and is 62 percent more effective than traditional models. With the addition of Topcoder, the community's members represent expertise in today's most coveted technologies, including AngularJS, Heroku, HTML5, Java, etc.
"The NASA Tournament Lab has partnered with Topcoder to tap into a global talent pool for algorithmic and software development," said Dr. Karim R. Lakhani, Principal Investigator of the Harvard NASA Tournament Lab. "The combination of the Topcoder community's breadth and depth of design and problem solving talent with CloudSpokes' cloud delivery model appears to create a unique offering in the technology solutions marketplace."
"CloudSpokes was able to provide the right balance of project management and access to a highly-skilled talent source to accelerate our projects forward quickly," said Brian Bednarek, CEO, MESH01. "The combination of CloudSpokes and Topcoder will provide us with a powerful crowdsourcing resource that we will utilize to cost-effectively meet tight development timelines."
The acquisition will provide members of both developer communities with dramatically more opportunities to earn money while showcasing their respective skills and capabilities. As a part of the investment, CloudSpokes will add an additional track at the Topcoder Open happening November 10-14, 2013, for cloud development, as well as increases in prize money.
"Topcoder pioneered community-driven open innovation and has delivered design, development and analytics solutions for companies and governments for more than a decade," said Jack Hughes, founder, Topcoder. "We have admired Appirio for bringing together the best of cloud development and crowdsourcing. With the addition of Topcoder, Appirio will redefine what it means to deliver compelling, agile and innovative solutions to customers globally."
Narinder Singh, co-founder of Appirio, has been appointed president of the combined communities. Topcoder founder Jack Hughes will join Appirio's crowdsourcing advisory board. David Messinger, vice president of community at CloudSpokes, has been promoted to Chief Community Officer of the combined communities.
About TopcoderTopcoder is the world's largest open innovation community of digital creators with more than a half million members representing algorithmists, software developers and creative artists globally. The Topcoder open innovation community creates digital assets including analytics, software and creative designs and solutions for a wide-ranging client base through a competitive, rigorous, standards based methodology. Combined with our extremely talented community this groundbreaking methodology results in superior outcomes for our clients.
About AppirioAppirio is a global services provider that uses crowdsourcing and cloud, social and mobile technology to help enterprises reimagine their business and become more agile. Appirio brings together technology expertise with a deep understanding of the way people work, and the nearly limitless skills of a crowdsourcing community of more than 75,000 developers, to help enterprises transform relationships with their customers, partners and workforce. Appirio has worked with more than 500 enterprises, including organizations like Facebook, Intuit, Japan Post Network, L'Oreal, McGraw-Hill, NetApp, The Four Seasons, and Virgin America. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, GGV Capital and General Atlantic.