iRise Corp., founded as a consultancy in 1996 and rebranded as a software provider in 2002, is the company behind iRise Studio, a simulation tool that lets companies test-drive enterprise applications before devoting money and time to their build-out.
A manufacturer with plans to tailor an SAP or Oracle ERP package to its particular needs, for example, must bring together three important constituents: the business user who will interact with the software, the software developers who will customize the application, and the business analyst who will act as liaison between the two.
The conventional tool of the business analyst is paper-based requirements documents. iRise's answer: an application that visually simulates the processes and user interfaces of the software package while the business analyst sits in a room or interacts online with the business users. Once the two parties settle on the proper configuration, that visual spec becomes the template the developers use to modify the software.
Emmet Keeffe, founder and CEO of iRise, likens his software to the transition that automakers made from designing on drafting boards to designing with CAD software. "At the end of the day," he says, "it's all about significantly improving how business and IT communicate when building software, and visualization really transforms that communication and allows the up-front requirements phase to go quicker, [with] less rework."