San Mateo: Appirio, which delivers products and professional services that help businesses accelerate their adoption of on-demand solutions, has announced it has 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.

Founded in 2006, Appirio has a proven track record of delivering both products and professional services using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies from industry leaders such as Google and salesforce.com. Appirio's service offerings have helped many large enterprises and forward-thinking companies to lower operational costs and improve business agility through on-demand systems that meet the needs of their business. Appirio also offers a product portfolio that 'connects the clouds' between Google, Salesforce and Amazon, enabling customers of all sizes to more easily adopt and extend these on-demand solutions within their organization.

Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital said, "Appirio is combining products and professional services so that customers can derive more value from the $300 billion they currently spend to acquire, customize and build business solutions."

"Sequoia Capital's investment will allow Appirio to help more companies realize the potential of cloud computing to impact their business," said Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio.

Last year, Appirio has seen revenue growing by more than 400 percent, the team more than quadruple in size. More than 1500 customers in 80 different countries adopted its products in less than three months. Appirio's customers now range from Global 1000 companies in telecommunications, high-tech and healthcare, to mid-size. With the business model proven, Appirio plans to use the additional funding to further invest in service and product offerings that accelerate the shift of the market to on-demand.

Appirio was founded by a team of 'reformed' enterprise software executives to address the unique challenges companies face when adopting on-demand solutions. The company was the first to partner with the two leading on-demand platform providers - salesforce.com and Google - offering professional services to help customers adopt these platforms.