Appirio buys TopCoder and mashes it up with CloudSpokes

Appirio, parent company of CloudSpokes, has bought up TopCoder, a developer community.

CloudSpokes itself is an outsourcing community. Together, CloudSpokes and TopCoder make up a workforce of 600,000 designers, developers, and data analysts.

“The rise of the sharing economy is quickly rendering the traditional systems integration and offshore biased model obsolete,” said Appirio CEO Chris Barbin in a statement on the news.

“Together, the CloudSpokes and TopCoder communities offer more elastic development and design resources than Accenture, Deloitte, and InfoSys combined.”

In a nutshell, the companies involved hope that TopCoder’s amazingly skilled community will meld with the CloudSpokes cloud-based delivery model to form a two-headed beast of efficient business and beautiful code.

“We have admired Appirio for bringing together the best of cloud development and crowdsourcing,” said TopCoder founder Jack Hughes.

“With the addition of TopCoder, Appirio will redefine what it means to deliver compelling, agile, and innovative solutions to customers globally.”

As part of the deal, Appirio cofounder Narinder Singh will now be president of the combined communities. Hughes will join Appirio’s advisory board, and David Messinger, vice president of community at CloudSpokes, will be chief community officer of the TopCoder/CloudSpokes entity.

Appirio was founded in 2006 and launched CloudSpokes in early 2011. To date, the parent company has taken in excess of $76 million in venture capital. Appirio is headquartered in San Francisco.

Connecticut-based TopCoder was founded in 2001. The startup took a single, $11 million round of funding in 2010.