By James Briggs, The Indianapolis Star
An Indianapolis cloud services consultancy has agreed to be acquired for $500 million in a deal that will create one of the world's largest information technology companies.
India-based Wipro Ltd. has reached a deal to buy Appirio, a company that started in San Francisco and moved its headquarters to Indianapolis last year. Appirio has 1,250 employees, including offices in San Francisco, Dublin, London, Jaipur, India and Tokyo. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.
Appirio works with large and mid-sized companies to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud. It helps companies with everything from human resources to social media campaigns. Its clients include Coca-Cola, eBay, Facebook and Home Depot.
Wipro is an IT consultancy that does business on six continents. While Appirio has just a fraction of Wipro's 170,000-person workforce, Appirio says it also has 1 million freelancers through its crowdsourcing business called Topcoder, which includes developers, designers and data scientists.
Appirio will retain its existing brand and leadership under CEO Chris Barbin, who said in a statement that the combined company will compete with some of the world's biggest IT and cloud services firms.
“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. “Together, our aim is to dominate the market."
The arrangement gives Appirio unusual leverage for a company that is being acquired.
"I think the thing that's very unique about this is that Wipro's cloud business is merging into our Appirio brand and our Appirio structure," said Stephen Pruden, Appirio's vice president of strategy and partnerships. "With that will come all kinds of different opportunities our employees and customers will have. We would expect people to take advantage of different technology practice areas and access to larger customer programs that maybe a mid-sized consultancy like Appirio doesn't get a chance to operate in."
Appirio partners with cloud-based platforms such as Salesforce, which also has a large presence in Indianapolis. Other software partners include Workday, Google and Amazon. Appirio helps clients incorporate those platforms into their businesses.
“Chris and his team have spent the last decade building Appirio into a global leader delivering amazing customer experiences with Salesforce,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement. “I couldn’t be more proud of Appirio as it joins Wipro, where together they will continue to drive customer success on a much larger scale.”
Appirio opened its Indianapolis office in 2012 with 20 people. The office grew to about 150 people a year ago when Appirio announced it was relocating its headquarters from San Francisco.
The company has 172 Indianapolis employees and expects to follow through on previous plans to grow to at least 577 people by 2020, Pruden said. The company is based at 201 S. Capitol Ave.
"If anything, there could be even more doubling down on the city as a result," Pruden said.
Appirio was lured to Indianapolis largely because of incentives. The Indiana Economic Development Corp. offered it up to $3.85 million in state tax credits and up to $150,000 in training grants if it fulfills its hiring plans.
©2016 The Indianapolis Star Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
