The internet changed our life for the last decade. I don’t think somebody will argue about that. Cloud is trending. Thinking about different aspects of how cloud is going to influence our future business, the topic of consultancy and service providing shouldn’t be missed. Some time ago, I posted – PLM, Cloud and Service Channel. Back three months ago my conclusion was as following
I have no doubt, introduction of new cloud solutions won’t reduce the amount of services and implementations. So, first, it is a good news for VARs and service providers. At the same time, cloud solutions will set a different “price” demand in front of vendors and partners. To re-organize to a new pricing structure will be another challenge.
The following announcement few days ago resonated to my thoughts about PLM cloud and service partners – General Atlantic And Sequoia Put 60M In Enterprise Cloud Consultancy Appirio. Here is the news, in a nutshell:
Cloud solution provider and consultancy Appirio is announcing $60 million in new funding led by private equity firm General Atlantic, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital. This brings Appirio’s total investment to over $70 million. Previous investors include Salesforce.
Appirio shows some impressive growth.
In 2011, Appirio grew revenue by over 80 percent, expanded into Europe with the acquisition of Saaspoint and developed the Cloud Enablement Suite, an integrated set of applications that supports enterprise cloud development. Additionally, the company introduced CloudSpokes, a crowdsourcing community for cloud development.
So, what is my conclusion? All PLM service providers that afraid about how cloud will destroy their business need to calm down. There are plenty of work to deploy cloud solutions and money is here. You will probably need to justify you skills and think about how to adopt your practices and experience to the speed of the cloud. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
