With Wipro as its Parent, Appirio CEO Sees Real Shot at Taking on Accenture, Deloitte

Indian IT services and consulting company Wipro announced on Thursday that it will acquire U.S. cloud services company Appirio for $500 million.

The deal is expected to close in the current quarter, and was announced a day before Wipro reports fiscal second-quarter earnings on Friday.

Wipro said its acquisition of Appirio will create one of the “world’s largest cloud transformation practices.” With the acquisition Wipro will gain Topcoder, a crowdsourcing marketplace, which Appirio acquired in September 2013.

The Salesforce expertise Appirio will bring to Wipro is also of particular interest. Salesforce has been a long-time investor and partner of Appirio, and last year, IDC recognized Appirio as a leader in Salesforce’s implementation provider ecosystem.

According to a report by Fortune, about half of Wipro’s revenue comes from business applications. Once the acquisition of Appirio is finalized, Wipro plans to bring its existing Salesforce and Workday cloud practices under the Appirio brand. Appirio will continue to be run by Appirio CEO Chris Barbin.

“Over the last few years, customers have been pushing us for deeper digital capabilities, transformational skills, enhanced account management capabilities, more verticals, and to be in 60 global locations rather than the six we are in now,” Barbin said in a blog post. “They’ve also been clamoring for additional technologies: Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe and Netsuite to name a few. While we’ve been making strides in some areas, we simply couldn’t scale all of these fast enough to meet customer demand. In the end, teaming with Wipro allows us to meet all of our current and prospective customer needs from day one, while retaining our amazing team that customers have come to know and love.”

In the blog post explaining the reasoning behind Appirio’s decision to be acquired by Wipro, Barbin said that Accenture and Deloitte have garnered “disproportionate market share” and “with that competitive dynamic in place” joining Wipro will help Appirio “have a direct and realistic shot at returning to the number one marketshare and mindshare position.”

Appirio is headquartered in Indianapolis but has offices in San Francisco, Dublin, Londong, Jaipur, and Tokyo with 1250 employees around the world.