Companies are increasingly turning to fitness wearables like the Fitbit to help reduce costs. Cloud services firm Appirio launched a wellness program it calls CloudFit, and provided the Fitbit device to 400 of its employees. As a reward for employee health data tracking, the company re-negotiated its employee health coverage rates, and saved $280,000 annually, over five percent of its annual bill. Appirio has 1,000 employees, with 450 in central offices in San Francisco, Indianapolis in the US and a site in India. The rest of the company is scattered across the world. The company offers technology and professional services to companies wishing to adopt public cloud applications such as offerings from Salesforce.com, Google Apps, and Amazon Web Services.

A year ago when Appirio said it was hoping to use data collected from employee wearables to negotiate a better deal on its health insurance bill, it seemed like a stretch. Could information that Appirio cobbled together about how many steps a couple hundred workers took each day convince an insurance company to lower its rates? It turns out Appirio cut a significant chunk from its insurance bill by doing just that. “When our [insurance] renewal came up for 2014, they shaved 5 percent off our renewal because of what we invest in CloudFit,” said Shannon Daly, vice president of HR Operations for Appirio. Five percent translates to $280,000 for Appirio, a consulting company that builds cloud projects for business customers. CloudFit is the internal name Appirio gives to its wellness program which includes Fitbit trackers as well as a new service that uses Google Hangouts to offer employees live video sessions with a trainer. The program got started when Appirio signed up with Anthem, an insurance provider, which offered the company $20,000 to start a wellness program. Appirio decided to use the money to buy fitness trackers for workers and institute programs so workers could share information about their progress with each other. It also hired a company, Spire Wellness, to help manage the program.