Cloud services provider Appirio has acquired TopCoder, an organisation that hosts a community of more than 500,000 developers, designers and data analytics experts.
Appirio, which recently released its latest social intranet solution, said it would integrate Cloudspokes – its own croudsourcing platform of more than 75,000 developers – with TopCoder’s development community to give users access to about 600,000 developers, designers and data analytics experts.
The deal should promote a technology platform that enables crowdsourcing as a core part of next generation services.
Appirio, which provides products and services to companies wishing to adopt cloud technologies, said it expects to offer more elastic development and design resources than Accenture and Deloitte and InfoSys.
Chris Barbin, co-founder and CEO at Appirio, said: "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."
TopCoder founder Jack Hughes added: "TopCoder pioneered community-driven open innovation and has delivered design, development and analytics solutions for companies and governments for more than a decade.
"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."
