Wipro Acquiring Appirio in $500 Million Deal

Indian IT outsourcing company Wipro has agreed to purchase Appirio for $500 million in an apparent move to capitalize on the American firm’s crowdsourcing platform, Topcoder.
Indianapolis-based Appirio has more than 1,200 employees and offices in half a dozen countries, including Japan and the United Kingdom. With an annual revenue of nearly $200 million, it counts Coca-Cola, NASA, eBay, Facebook, and Home Depot among its customers.
Appirio comes with Topcoder, a crowdsourcing marketplace connecting over a million designers, developers, and data scientists around the world.
Once the deal is closed, Wipro will combine its cloud application development units, including Workday, under Appirio, which will continue to be headed by its current CEO Chris Barbin.
“When you combine Wipro’s global scale and deep digital focus with Appirio’s transformative worker and customer experience expertise, and best in class team, brand, and partners, you create a formidable force in the industry,” Barbin said in a statement.
Analysts say Appirio was a good bet for Wipro to make its mark in cloud business: crowdsourcing is the future of application development and Appirio has a long-time relationship with Indian software professionals, whom Wipro can easily pull together. According to The Economic Times, Indians account for 250,000 coders working on the platform.
Appirio is one of the largest independent cloud services implementation partners for SaaS (software as a service) vendors such as Salesforce and Workday. In addition, Appirio can even spur the growth of Wipro’s other crowd-sourcing programs, such as Top Gear.
“Appirio and Wipro are coming together to unlock transformational synergies in the applications space and help enterprises create new business models,” said Abidali Z. Neemuchwala, CEO of Wipro.
This is Wipro’s second major purchase in the cloud services sector this year. Earlier in February, it acquired HealthPlan Services, a business process as a service (BPaaS) provider in the United States health insurance market, for $460 million.