We are pleased to announce that Ed Lange, former Chief Customer Officer for SAP, has joined iRise as a strategic consultant and a member of our Board of Advisors. Mr. Lange will be leveraging strong relationships with strategic SAP customers and global systems integrators to advise iRise leadership on building successful customer-centric programs related to the recent announcement that SAP is now reselling the iRise platform globally. Throughout his career at SAP, Ed observed business stakeholders struggling to interpret and understand lengthy requirements documentation produced during the Blueprint process. When he learned about our “computer-aided-design platform for SAP” and how iRise accelerates time to value while improving user acceptance, he was compelled to join our team as a consultant and member of the Advisory Board.

In Mr. Lange’s role as Chief Customer Officer at SAP, he reported directly to Bill McDermott and served as the executive responsible for some of SAP's largest strategic global customer deployments. His knowledge of enterprise customer relationship management, especially long-term development and customer care, will be invaluable for us in accelerating the adoption of iRise globally.

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Each year, iRise produces three Executive Roundtables with a vision of “world-class content & networking with no selling”. Last month nearly forty executives came together for our 1st annual iRise Executive Roundtable at the Kentucky Derby, which featured a full day of content and a day of networking at Churchill Downs. The event was moderated by Ralph Szygenda, former CIO at General Motors and keynote speakers included Bob Evans, former SVP at InformationWeek, Guy Chiarello, CIO at JPMorganChase, Brian Rice, CIO at Kellogg, Katie Graham, Global Practice Managing Partner at Heidrick & Struggles, Information Officers Practice and others. Click here to view formal invitation.



On July 8-11, 2011 the Executive Roundtable at Formula 1 British Grand Prix will be held in London. On July 8th, business and IT leaders from around Europe will assemble for a roundtable featuring keynote speakers such as Tim Campos, CIO at Facebook, Dana Deasy, CIO at British Petroleum, Al-Nor Ramji, former CIO at British Telecom, Matt Cadieux, CIO at Red Bull Racing and several others. Over the weekend, our guests will be networking at Silverstone hosted by the 2010 Constructors’ and Drivers’ World Championship winning Red Bull Racing F1 team. Click here to view the formal invitation. At this event, CIOs and business executives from large global organizations are welcome to attend pending approval by iRise. Please contact nkwon@iRise.com for more information.

We arrived Sunday afternoon in Orlando to construct the iRise booth. An elaborate setup is planned including a huge Formula 1 racing simulator. We get a call letting us know that (ironically) the truck transporting the simulator got into a rollover accident and isn’t coming. What to do? We tried putting a full size NASCAR simulator in our booth, which left enough space for about one person to stand. We deliberated and realized that while it would get a lot of attention (those cars are huge!), it wasn't very practical. We opted for a standard arcade size racing game, which left room for people to come into the booth and visit our two iRise demo stations.

As the next to last space shuttle launch took place just a few miles to the east, Monday morning started with the initial keynote. Soon a small group of people arrived at our booth. Then another, and another... Before we knew it, we had converted the central space in our booth (originally slated to play a promo video) into a third demo station. Our booth was packed and buzzing! Everyone wanted to know what “iRise” and “visualization” was all about; why was everyone talking about it?

Demo after demo, you could see the light bulbs turning on. “Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?” “Where was this during our last project?” At certain times people waiting for demos were backed up all the way across the aisle into the other booths! We started doing demos for larger groups and answering questions from the audience. At one point iRise employee Chris Fuller was giving a demo to 21 people from 4 different companies: Sysco, Dean Foods, Caterpillar and Ford (no pressure Chris). One of my favorite comments: “I’m buying stock!” (sorry- we’re still private :-)

iRise CEO & Co-Founder Emmet B. Keeffe III keynoted roundtable discussions led by exectutives from Hershey and National Grid who both had great things to say about iRise. During the roundtable we were worried to see people leaving early, but it turned out they were going directly to our booth for a demo! The entire event wrapped up Sunday night with a concert from Sting.

We’d like to sincerely thank everyone from SAP and all involved for making SAPPHIRE NOW an amazing experience.

Michael Hughes
Director of Customer Solutions - iRise

I am excited to unveil a new recurring section to the monthly newsletter dedicated to our accelerator products and services. Besides sharing updates on these products and services I would like to use this as a forum to showcase specific customer stories. From our newsletters, press releases, web site, or from attending our user conferences, many of you have already seen several updates regarding our accelerator products - CodeGen, Connect for HPQC and Adoption Center. With that in mind they will not be the focal point of this first post. Instead I wanted to introduce a new concept that we’ve been discussing internally at iRise for a while, and an area where you will see quite a few updates over the coming months.

“Code Red” projects are the mission critical programs within your organization that have the highest level of attention of the executive team and, when anything goes wrong, keep the entire team working long hours until the issues are resolved. Perhaps it’s a global ERP rollout or the company’s new mobile initiative; the projects take many forms but are generally linked to a business-critical initiative. What's been fascinating to observe is how often the root cause of the Code Red projects is a lack of alignment between business and IT. Introducing iRise to address this issue has proven to be a game-changer for many of our customers, often creating impact in a matter of days. If you have been involved in Code Red projects where iRise was able to help turn things around we want to hear from you! Send us your story – we would love to feature it in the newsletter.

Look out for more updates on this topic over the coming months and the formalization of new accelerator services designed specifically to help programs and projects that have entered “Code Red”.

iRise was honored to contribute to Sharefest’s Annual Workday kick off charity event. A team of iRise employees helped setup a computer lab valued at over $45,000 for the Holmes Avenue Elementary School. A handful of semi-functional 11+ year old computers were replaced by 30 state of the art Dell PCs. It was a privilege to see the tearful expressions of amazement and gratitude of the unsuspecting teachers and administrators, and the wide-eyed excitement of the students, many of whom don't have access to a computer at home.

The work involved included researching and ordering Dell PC’s and supplies, ordering and configuring new computer lab management software, helping set up the computers, and scheduling training for the teachers on the new lab software. We’re incredibly proud of the iRise employees involved (I’d love to mention their names but they asked that I don’t). Great job!

Find more pictures from the event on our Facebook Page.

If you are an avid iRise user, you know that once you get started, the process of building simulations in iRise is fairly simple. As with most feature-rich applications, however, brand new users often find themselves overwhelmed by the possibilities. When that first blank page appears in their first project, modeler’s block is not an uncommon reaction.

We are pleased to announce that as of the 8.8 release, a series of Quick Start Videos is now available to Studio users via the Studio Welcome Screen. These brief videos cover the most common tasks an iRise modeler needs to understand in order to be productive with iRise Studio, including the following:

• Managing projects
  

• Visualizing Scenario and simple data flows
  

• Collaborating in iRise
  

• Building a basic UI
  

• Building reusable componente
  

Not planning to upgrade to 8.8 as soon as it leaves the gates? We’ve got you covered. All of the Quick Start Videos are available on the iRise YouTube channel. You can even subscribe to the Quick Start Videos podcast feed in iTunes so you can download the videos to your iOS device and watch them offline. The initial set of videos is fairly version-agnostic, so users of version 8.0 and up will benefit.

While only the first six Quick Start Videos will be accessible from iRise Studio, we plan to add new videos to the YouTube channel and the podcast feed over time, so stay tuned for new episodes. Please send feedback and ideas for new videos to education@irise.com, or add your comments to the YouTube channel. Enjoy!

Congratulations to our new additions to the iRise on Campus program!

• Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México
  

• New York University, Wager School of Public Service
  

The iRise on Campus program helps universities to develop the visualization skills of students enabling them to provide the right solution in real time. The program provides select undergraduate and graduate programs with the opportunity to use cutting edge requirements visualization technology in computer science, human-computer interaction, IT and entrepreneurship courses. Using the iRise visualization solution in these courses provides students with practical experience that translates directly to the workplace and enables young innovators to express their ideas. Professors will have the ability to quickly present interface design concepts and demonstrate effective requirements elicitation.

We are actively looking to connect with faculty members at Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Tech, Rutgers, Oxford, Cambridge and the University of Toronto. If you have faculty contacts at one of these schools, please refer them to this educational opportunity and send their contact information to academic@irise.com. Do you know other schools that could benefit from the iRise on Campus program? Would you like iRise to be integrated into the curriculum at your alma mater? For more information, contact the iRise on Campus team.

New IBM Solutions Tour for SAP

iRise and IBM have teamed to help companies visualize before they build, with dramatic results. SAP solutions get to market twice as fast, with 30% less cost, all with improved quality and usability. The ability to demonstrate complex company centric solutions is much simpler. IBM’s experience in SAP blueprinting using iRise provides users and stakeholders the ability to test drive key innovations such as Mobility, Embedded Analytics, Process Alerts, and simple-to-use Composite Applications.

Take a product tour of the new iRise / IBM for SAP solution now:

As an early adopter, IBM’s SAP practice has assembled over 175 SAP components across multiple modules, to further accelerate the creation of process simulations.

New iRise Training Dates Announced

iRise training classes are designed to empower stakeholders and users with the knowledge and experience to quickly become proficient with iRise.

Discounts available. You’ll receive your iRise Experienced Certificate upon completion. To learn more about iRise training classes: Click Here