Appirio Storms European Cloud Market With Saaspoint Buy
The financial terms of the acquisition were not divulged. The Saaspoint buy marks San Mateo, Calif.-based Appirio's fourth acquisition this year and beefs up its global presence with a foundation in Europe in addition to the U.S., Japan and India.
"Today, I'm excited to announce that we're now in Europe and, with the acquisition of Saaspoint today, are one step further in our quest to be the pure-play global cloud integrator. Saaspoint is the largest and most experienced European-based provider of cloud consulting services and, while it's our fourth acquisition this year, joining forces with them is a big milestone for Appirio," Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio, said in a blog post announcing the Saaspoint acquisition.
The Saaspoint acquisition also broadens Appirio's partners' reach, extending its Salesforce.com, Google and Workday offerings into Europe. Saaspoint already had a strong Salesforce and Google practice in Europe. According to IDC, public cloud services revenue will grow 27.6 percent globally to $73 billion by 2015. But in Western Europe, cloud services revenue is expected to rise more than 35 percent in the same time period. Barbin said that growth is a major opportunity and the Saaspoint buy gives Appirio the resources to capitalize on that market shift.
Barbin wrote that the addition of Saaspoint also helps Appirio build up its core team to keep up with the demand of large European and multinational engagements.
"Cloud computing is poised for significant growth in Europe with companies like Salesforce.com, Google and Workday moving aggressively into the market, but the partner ecosystem is still evolving," Barbin said in a statement. "European customers that want a partner with both cloud-focused expertise and a global footprint have had limited options to date -- our goal is to fill that void."
Upon the transaction's closing, which is expected in the fourth quarter, Saaspoint's team will join Appirio's existing 400 cloud experts and will be able to leverage Appirio's CloudSpokes crowdsourcing developer community, which has grown to nearly 30,000 developers in more than 65 countries.