Company & Culture

Celebrating 2013 and the Year Ahead

By Dan Saks / December 26, 2013

It seems hard to believe, but 2014 is right around the corner. With everything that’s happened at AppDirect over the past 12 months, it seems like 2013 passed in the blink of an eye. Time can be deceiving, but there’s no doubt that 2013 has been our best year yet, filled with new successes, new opportunities, and new team members.

Why has 2013 been such a special year for AppDirect? To start, in 2013 we announced some of our most exciting partnerships to date, including Staples and Comcast. These names are not only two of the largest, most well known companies in the United States, but they are also trusted providers of software and services to millions of small businesses across the country.

We also entered new markets and expanded our global footprint. For example, in April, we announced a partnership with TeliaSonera, one of the largest telecom companies in Sweden. These are just a few examples, but taken together our partners have helped us expand our reach to more than 12 million SMBs around the world.

New partners aren’t the only reason 2013 was so remarkable; the past year also brought several industry firsts for AppDirect. Over the summer, we opened APIs to our entire platform, a first for the cloud services brokerage sector. With our APIs, we now offer full marketplace functionality and our app catalog to any service provider. In September, Cloud Foundry became the first partner to utilize our APIs to launch its Add-on Marketplace, giving its developers the ability to find, purchase, and bind third-party services to applications.

In September, we also hosted our inaugural Partner Summit, the industry’s first and perhaps only event with an in-depth focus on cloud services brokerage. The Summit drew nearly 200 people from around the world, from service providers and developers, to industry experts and journalists. The sheer number of attendees, and their palpable sense of excitement, sent a clear message: CSB opportunities are virtually unlimited, and we've just started to explore how to make them a reality.

The Summit was a defining moment of 2013, not only because it was our first partner event, but also because it served as the stage for a huge announcement: our acquisition of Standing Cloud. Together, AppDirect and Standing Cloud provide unparalleled solutions that offer more features and functionalities than any other competitor, technology that can be used by almost any provider for any type of use case. We look forward to seeing where our combined technologies will take us in 2014 and beyond.

Finally, 2013 was also the year we introduced the new face of AppDirect to the world. Our new triangular logo is a bold, distinctive image that our partners and team members can instantly recognize. It communicates a sense of how far we’ve come, and is a powerful touchstone we can use to guide us as we continue to grow and expand.

We are tremendously grateful to all of our partners and colleagues who made these achievements possible, and we look forward to even greater successes in 2014. From all of us at AppDirect to all of you, happy holidays and warms wishes for a fantastic new year.