Appirio Accelerates European Cloud Push with Saaspoint Buy

Cloud integrator Appirio is making good on its intent to grow globally with the acquisition of European cloud service provider Saaspoint — its fourth such purchase in 2011, and one that’s going to help Appirio investor Salesforce.com fulfill its goal of expanding its channel presence in EMEA.

In the official press release, Appirio repeatedly mentioned Saaspoint’s depth of experience as a major reason for the acquisition. Saaspoint, founded in 2005, serves more than 100 customers, and has two offices in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Appirio is promoting its grab of this base of talent and physical presence as a strong starting point for aggressively pushing out into the European market. Appirio already operates offices in the United States, Japan and India.

Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio, explained some of the logic behind the purchase in a prepared statement:

“Cloud computing is poised for significant growth in Europe with companies like salesforce.com, Google and Workday moving aggressively into the market, but the partner ecosystem is still evolving. European customers that need a partner with both cloud-focused expertise and a global footprint have had limited options. Our goal is to fill that void.”

As you may have guessed from that quote, Appirio is a prominent partner of Google and Workday in addition to Salesforce.com, and a major voice in cloud evangelism besides.

Because they are privately held companies, details are scant on how much Appirio paid for Saaspoint. And it’s equally hazy what exactly is going to happen to existing Saaspoint employees when the deal closes before year’s end — though it seems to me that anything other than transitioning them fully to Appirio employees would be antithetical to the point of this acquisition in the first place.