Emmet B. Keeffe, CEO of iRise spelled out his vision for iRise and the future of application simulation at today’s partner conference, Fusion ‘07. His roadmap began with a prediction that by 2020 all business software will be simulated prior to development. It’ll be a trend that companies will have to follow as those who do will reduce their time and cost to market by 50%. If that prediction becomes true, it could be enormous business because every year organizations invest $500 billion into business software (source: Forrester). Currently iRise helps customers reduce software development costs and time to market by as much as 30%, Keefe said.

Keeffe believes the trend to software simulation is inevitable given the trends of other CAD (computer aided design) industries like architecture. He asked an architect friend of his when he knew he had to move from paper design to CAD. He said it was because his competitor did it first, lowered his cost structure, and now the paper designing architect was no longer competitive. Keeffe’s architect friend had no choice. He had to adopt CAD if he wanted to stay in business.

I spoke with Keeffe last night at dinner and he said that the one thing that keeps coming up over and over again is the growing and tenuous relationship between business analysts and business users. He is focusing much of his energy helping companies build a people process transformation to help evolve this relationship. Like any major transformation, it’s an issue that has to happen from the top down.

Another hope Keeffe projected for 2020 is that packaged software firms will adopt iRise as a simulation of their own software for their customers. For example, an enterprise application like SAP would sell its software with a built-in iRise simulation tool that the SAP customer can test first before deployment.

Lastly, Keeffe understands that there’s pressure in the software development life cycle (SDLC) to reduce time to market. While Keeffe and iRise’s objective is to help customers reduce SDLCs he wants customers to see iRise as an innovation tool that can be used to test multiple ideas visually so they can more safely determine which one they want to fund.