Appirio Bulks Up Salesforce Presence With Infowelders Buy

The Infowelders acquisition marks the second purchase in the last month, and the second ever, for San Mateo, Calif.-based Appirio, a decorated cloud player. Louisville-based Infowelders uses SaaS technologies, its vast Salesforce understanding and its business intelligence history to deliver full-service consulting around Salesforce and specializing in sales cloud, service cloud and custom cloud development.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed and it is expected to close by the end of this month.

"While Infowelders may not be a household name, you'd be surprised at how often their name came up when talking to customers, prospects and even Salesforce itself," wrote Appirio CEO Chris Barbin in a blog post highlighting Appirio's Infowelders acquisition. "They've been around for almost seven years, helped more than 250 customers take their first steps to the cloud, and in the process, have built a well-respected, talented team that folks in the upper reaches of Salesforce and our other partners call 'smart,' 'reliable' and 'good people.'"

Appirio said adding Infowelders to the fold fortifies its core Salesforce CRM and Force.com consulting business and beefs up its presence in the Midwest, adds additional expertise in mobile cloud development and makes Appirio the most certified cloud-focused partner of Salesforce.

"Demand for Salesforce and Force.com services has dramatically increased in the last year, as evidenced by our own triple-digit growth and the 92,000 companies that now count themselves Salesforce customers," Barbin said in a statement. "The acquisition of Infowelders brings us a talented and experienced group of professionals who have proven themselves time and again in the cloud and Salesforce ecosystems."

The Infowelders acquisition also brings aboard six packaged solutions that Appirio will wrap into its Cloud Asset Library, Appirio's growing library of reusable assets used to accelerate Salesforce implementations. Infowelders, which was founded in 2004, also brings aboard more than 700 successful cloud projects with more than 250 customers.

"We've built a strong business by hiring the best talent, focusing on the right partners and delivering tangible bottom line results for our customers -- Appirio has that same reputation," said Adam Wiebe, President and CEO of Infowelders. "We're excited to be part of Appirio's large and growing team of trusted cloud advisers, and look forward to serving a broader range of customers across the globe."

Appirio's acquisition of Infowelders comes about three weeks after Appirio acquired the TRE3 Group, an advisory group that helps sales, marketing and support teams work by better tying with collaborative selling solutions joining together CRM and the social Web. The TRE3 Group acquisition gives Appirio new collaborative selling and social CRM weapons in its cloud computing arsenal.

Appirio launched in 2006 and came out of the gate as a cloud solution provider offering both products and professional services aimed at enterprises looking to adopt cloud applications and platforms. Appirio has brought more than 180 enterprises into the cloud with solutions around Salesforce.com, Google and Amazon, and more than 5,000 companies use Appirio's products.

For services, Appirio offers cloud strategy, SaaS implementation, custom cloud development and cloud management. Its product set includes CloudWorks, a cloud broker technology for cross-cloud solutions that unifies identity, security, data , context and business object definitions across varying cloud applications like Salesforce, Workday and Google Apps. The company also offers Professional Services Enterprise, an on-demand solution to give management insight and to help services teams attack projects.