Appirio Tackles Custom Cloud App Development, Sync

With two new offerings unveiled on Wednesday, start-up Appirio represents the leading edge of two new issues enterprises will increasingly need to tackle with the emergence of cloud computing: how best to develop apps for the cloud and how to connect the disparate data they're storing with various service providers.

Appirio is taking aim at companies ready to migrate systems to the cloud but unsure how to do so with a new suite consulting and custom development services called Business Model Prototyping. It's a model that will likely find competitors as cloud computing begins to take off. Starting at around $20,000, though, it's not for the uncommitted.

"Certainly I'd agree that not every company is ready for a business model prototype, and this isn't something that's for the company in the early stages of adoption of on demand," Ryan Nichols, VP of product management and marketing for Appirio, said in an interview. However, he added, "we think the platforms are ready." The technology is there, he said, and services like this one can help spur demand by providing customers with their first real taste of cloud computing with custom apps.

Business Model Prototyping begins with a multi-day brainstorming session and one day workshop to lay out ideas and plans, followed by design of a cloud application and prototyping of the application on Force.com or Amazon Web Services. If that pans out, Appirio can take a step further by developing a working production application for an additional fee.

One of Appirio's first custom cloud app development customers was self-service publisher Author Solutions. For a fee, authors can have Author Solutions edit, print and distribute their books through stores like Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Early customers sent their books in on floppy disks, typewritten pages or in e-mails, but today, the publishing system is built entirely on Force.com. Transactions, marketing system, proof-reading, content uploads and even workflow all takes place in the Force.com application.

"It's a true ERP system for publishing," Author CEO and technology industry veteran Kevin Weiss said in an interview.

When new CEO Kevin Weiss took over the rapidly growing $50 million company in January, he found its IT systems "being held together by band-aids and chewing gum." There was a poor homegrown CRM system, no content management and three separate workflow systems. The company needed something to change the game, and Weiss' background in tech told him that cloud computing was hot, and that if Author could pull off a cloud-based publishing system, it could transform the way the company did IT.

Appirio came in and did a 30-day assessment of what Author needed to do to move its systems and data to a cloud computing paradigm, ensure that the company's IT department had enough in-house expertise and that Force.com had the capabilities Author needed. The application, which Appirio and Author worked together to build over several months, includes some CRM capabilities from Salesforce.com, workflow capabilities from the Force.com platform, and plenty of coding in Force.com's Apex programming language for custom publishing capabilities. Despite some lingering concerns about security and uptime, Weiss said that cloud computing had the potential to change the game for Author's business and the way it does IT. "We believe that it's an order of magnitude less time to add more product, change the way we present data with customers, integrate an acquisition, and the number of people we need in our tech shop changes dramatically," he said. It's also a way to attract IT talent in a competitive market since his IT shop is working with an early stage technology in an on demand line of business app.

Appirio's main focus will be on developing apps that run on Force.com, it will also develop apps that stitch together the capabilities of multiple cloud platforms, such as something that uses the workflow capabilities of Force.com combined with the storage capacity of Amazon S3. "You can stitch these platforms together to overcome some of the limitations of one platform or another," Nicholas said.

However, Appirio will likely hold off on working with companies like Microsoft and SAP at first as they release their cloud platforms, instead partnering with companies that have a clear dedication to SAAS and cloud computing in general. "We're skeptical that companies like Microsoft are going to be able to do that, and we certainly get the same questions as SAP," he said. "We'd be surprised if those platforms emerge to be as strong as those emerging from Salesforce or Google."

Appirio is also offering a new contact and calendar sync service for businesses called Premium Sync that's likely a harbinger of things to come. As online services grow, customers will want to move information among them. Companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce are all offering APIs to expose information stored in their systems, but moving data from one service to another isn't an easy snap of the fingers.

So Appirio is offering Premium Sync to keep calendars and contacts in sync between Salesforce and Google Apps. The goal, Appirio says, is to get companies to think about Salesforce as more than just sales force automation and Google as more than just collaboration, but the two as platforms for doing more. For example, a fitness equipment manufacturer uses Google Calendar to make managers' calendars available to direct reports and uses sync to pull metadata like event attendee information and budget data from Salesforce into calendar entries.

The new Premium Sync is a companion to unsupported versions that Appirio already offers. The new version adds enterprise support, more admin capabilities and unlimited synch. It starts at $50 per seat per year. Down the line, Appirio hopes to add other service providers to the list of sync partners, but according to Nichols, "connecting the cloud is harder than it sounds because a lot of the endpoints are still relatively closed."

InformationWeek recently shined the spotlight on eight key vendors' strategies, including Google, Amazon and Salesforce and the services businesses can expect from them. Two-year-old Sequoia Capital-backed Appirio is the fastest growing partner of salesforce.com and Google and was one of the earliest companies building applications for Salesforce's Force.com cloud application platform. Already counted among its customers are Honeywell, VMware, Applied Biosystems, and Dolby.