Integrated Collaboration, Communication and Process Automation in the Cloud: EnterpriseWizard

At the recent "All About the Cloud" conference in San Francisco, Doug Hauger of Microsoft discussed the types of business applications he and his colleagues were seeing users move to cloud environments. Mr. Hauger noted that applications such as those for collaboration are moving to the cloud with some alacrity. Focus believes that Mr. Hauger’s observations reflect what users are doing accurately.

As collaboration and communication applications gain useful features and ease of use, they become increasingly critical to more sizes and types of businesses.  Also, lower acquisition, deployment and management costs fuel the growth of hosted communication and collaboration solutions. But these solutions must make their users at least as productive as legacy alternatives, while placing lighter resource demands on the businesses that rely on them.

To maximize their business value, such solutions should not only be easier, faster and/or cheaper than their predecessors.  They should not only enable and support better communication and collaboration, inside and beyond the company.  But they should also help enable and support consistent, scalable and non-disruptive compliance with the business policies that govern the flow of those communication and collaboration efforts.  Further, auditability should be a “free” side effect of process automation.

Vendors have lately made several announcements intended to spur adoption of cloud-based tools for process mapping and manipulation, among other related tasks. But few vendors have explained or delivered sufficient business value to achieve those adoption goals.

Focus believes that this may be changing. One example is EnterpriseWizard.  This process automation and collaboration tool enables rapid, drag-and-drop creation of applications that handle tasks ranging from Help Desk Management and CRM to Contract Management and Regulatory Compliance.  The underlying platform allows rapid creation of hosted, process-driven, business-centric, custom-tailored business communication and collaboration tools without coding.

EnterpriseWizard has recently begun offering free 10-user editions of its solution to select businesses. The company has focused on development and refinement of its solution for much of the past seven years, and has quietly signed up and worked closely with multiple customers deploying EnterpriseWizard for a wide variety of business tasks. Those customers are uniformly impressed with the solution’s speed of development, flexibility and ease of use, according to comments in customer case studies and by CEO Colin Earl in discussions with Focus.

• Asmar Muhammad is from Affinity Development Group (ADG), a provider of affinity and CRM programs. “When a new project comes along that needs to be organized with some kind of workflow and tracking capability, we immediately think of EnterpriseWizard, because we know we can configure it quickly and it will just work,” Mr. Muhammad remarked. ADG used the solution to build a sports registration and customer support system that supports multiple customers and their end users, a system ADG built and took live in two weeks, according to Mr. Muhammad.
• Bob Kaplan is Manager of Applications at Shorenstein Realty Services L.P. The company owns and manages major office buildings across the United States. He notes that “In EnterpriseWizard I am able to create entire custom tables and linkages between those tables during my lunch hour and not only does everything just work but the data is automatically actionable because these custom tables are live, with full workflow, business rules, reports, etc.”
• Another example is Chevron, which uses EnterpriseWizard in a global deployment for Sarbanes Oxley compliance, according to Mr. Earl. The system took less than two months to develop and went live on time and on budget, Mr. Earl said.

“Development speed is illustrated by the customer that deployed EnterpriseWizard for online return materials authorization and parts ordering, customer support, contract management and billable time management.  They went live after just 40 hours of consulting time, which made a compelling contrast to the $500,000 and man years of effort that they had spent trying to develop the system internally before they turned to us,” Mr. Earl added.

Focus believes that EnterpriseWizard is one of a small but growing number of offerings that represent a profound shift in the creation and delivery of integrated communication and collaboration solutions. To maximize their competitive agility, responsiveness and efficiency, businesses need solutions that support their communication and collaboration needs, while aligning and complying with their specific business processes. And those solutions should not require extensive IT support resources or expertise to deliver business value.

Focus believes that IT and business process decision makers should look closely at EnterpriseWizard, as a potentially valuable solution and as an example of the types of features candidate solutions should support. Those decision makers should also insist that all “short-listed” candidate solution providers provide direct contact with at least once credible, directly comparable customer reference.