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Appirio has announced a new set of products and services to "accelerate the adoption of on-demand at both the grass roots and executive management levels of an organization," according to company officials.

 

The product, Appirio Personal Sync for Salesforce and Google, lets users selectively synchronize information from their personal Gmail e-mail and calendar system with their organization's Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

 

The vendor also offers a new Personal and Premium edition of its synchronization tools for Google and Salesforce.com, letting users" connect their day-to-day productivity tools."

 

Now available is a packaged service that facilitates the prototyping of new business models using on-demand platforms, "giving executives tangible insight into how cloud computing can impact their business," in the words of company officials.

 

"Cloud computing has had a profound impact on the way individuals work and the way businesses run, but we've only just scratched the surface," said Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio. "At one end of the spectrum we're mobilizing individuals by giving them tools to connect the different on-demand solutions they rely on to get their job done. On the other end of the spectrum we're helping executives 'think bigger' about the power of cloud computing and what it can bring to their company."

 

"Thousands" of on-demand services and solutions exist today to make users more productive and businesses more successful, but unfortunately, "few of these work together," Appirio officials say, limiting the potential of each individual tool and forcing users to "manually compensate for the separation between the tools they use to work and the business information they need."

 

For companies that use Salesforce together with Google Apps (Google's business-focused communication and collaboration applications), Appirio also unveiled Premium Contact and Calendar Sync. This subscription-based service extends Appirio's free synchronization products, unveiled earlier this year. The Premium edition offers unlimited sync for both contacts and calendars, centralized user administration, and enterprise-level support.

 

The vendor has also announced a new Business Model Prototyping service, a 4-8 week engagement targeted to executives at large and mid-sized organizations who want a better understanding of how cloud computing works and can work for their firms.

 

In July, Appirio announced it had secured Series B financing of $5.6 million. The funding was led by Sequoia Capital, the investment firm behind Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, and PayPal.

 

This round of financing follows a Series A investment earlier this year, which brought in $1.1 million from Salesforce.com and angel investors.

 

Appirio, founded in 2006, sells both products and professional services using Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service technologies from such as Google and Salesforce.com.

 

The company's service offerings are billed as helping users lower operational costs and improve business agility through on-demand systems. It also offers a product portfolio that "connects the clouds" between Google, Salesforce and Amazon, company officials say, letting customers "adopt and extend these on-demand products within their organization."