Appirio, the parent company of crowdsourced cloud development community, CloudSpokes, has announced the acquisition of its much larger competitor, TopCoder. The merged developer community will have almost 6000 members. providing a valuable resource for those looking for developer and data analytics expertise.

According to the announcement on the CloudSpokes blog:

By combining the respective strengths of CloudSpokes and TopCoder, we’ve enabled a single place for organizations to instantly tap into and reward nearly 600,000 of the best technical experts in the world. As a marketplace for businesses who need innovation and development, there really is no substitute for the breadth of skills and real-world innovation this new combined powerhouse of community experts provides.

Prior to the acquisition CloudSpokes had a worldwide community of more than 75,000 cloud experts. Meanwhile, the TopCoder community, which has been in business for around a decade, could claim over 500,000 developers and had built a reputation as a partner of companies like Google and Facebook, both as a place to recruit talent and to help build projects.

Narinder Singh, Appirio co-founder, told TechCrunch:

“All enterprises may not have the pull to hire the same coders as Facebook and Google, but using Appirio with TopCoder now can give them the same access to that kind of expertise."

The acquisition will add skills in AngularJS, Heroku, HTML5 and Java to CloudSpokes’ list of cloud-centered skills, providing an even stronger resource for crowdsourced cloud development. Like Topcoder, CloudSpokes offers competitions and hackathons with cash prizes on offer for coming up with effective and innovative solutions. At the time of writing there are six active challenges with 177 community member from 14 countries working on them and $9,400 available in prize money,