Appirio announced its first international expansion into Japan. As part of this expansion, Appirio announced that it will be working closely with salesforce.com to lead the Force.com platform implementation at Japan Post. Japan Post offers postal, banking and life insurance services, serving over 50 million individual customers and employing over 100,000 people. It reported as the largest Force.com cloud computing platform implementation in the world.

"We see huge potential for cloud computing and the Force.com platform in our organization, and Appirio's proven success with enterprises and insight into the platform's capabilities will help us realize that potential," said Akira Iwasaki, CIO of Japan Post. "Appirio has already completed a strategic analysis of our existing applications infrastructure and they are helping us plan our ongoing migration to the Force.com platform."

According to a September 2008 user survey published by industry analyst firm Gartner, 60 percent of respondents in Asia Pacific said they plan to increase their investment in SaaS subscriptions, integration and consulting in the next two years. More than 50 percent of Asia Pacific respondents in the same survey said they were currently transitioning from a current on-premise solution to a SaaS solution.

• Japanese Government Launches Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum
• Appirio Leverages Force.com