EL SEGUNDO, CA – October 27, 2009 – iRise®, the world's leading enterprise visualization solutions company today announced that Allied North America Insurance, a leading insurance brokerage focused on the construction industry, has adopted iRise to speed up the delivery of new business software. One of the initial projects visualized with iRise was a system used by clients and employees to automate the issuing and tracking of tens of thousands of certificates of insurance for construction projects. The project was delivered 40% faster than with traditional requirements methods, which has driven Allied to now adopt iRise on a broad range of new projects.

"Improving business efficiency is a major goal of IT," stated Ira Schwartz, CIO for Allied North America and CIO magazine "CIO 100" honoree in 2009. "Visualization has turned out to be a game changer that has not only improved our definition process but enabling us to partner even closer with the business."

Prior to the use of iRise, new applications were defined with text documents, static screen shots and use case diagrams. Business stakeholders struggled to imagine how the final application might look and behave, leading to confusion, rework and delays. Allied North America's training team, acting as business analysts for the certificates of insurance project, adopted visualization from iRise as a strategy to put fully functional, highly immersive previews into the hands of the business stakeholders, taking the guesswork out of the requirements process.

"Using the visualization as a guide, our development team had complete confidence in what they were building," said Lauren Saverino, director of training and development for Allied. "Our business users were stunned with the improvement; the feedback we received was incredibly valuable and the whole process was accelerated."

"iRise is changing the face of the software world," said Mitch Bishop, CMO at iRise. "Visualizing before you build is simply becoming a best practice for organizations that develop complex business software, which directly translates into business advantage for companies that transform their thinking."

Enterprise Visualization – The Ultimate Change Agent
Enterprise visualization software from iRise gives business and IT leaders a powerful way to “move the needle” and cost-effectively drive change in their organizations.  iRise is the only enterprise grade, real-time collaborative software definition platform on the market today.  By enabling global organizations to “test drive” and fully experience critical business systems early in the process, iRise is now an essential strategy to modernize their systems, consolidate applications, cut cost, accelerate delivery and leverage global sourcing partnerships without the usual confusion and risk.

With thousands of projects completed successfully, the value of visualization has proven to be enormous for businesses in highly competitive markets:

• Get to market twice as fast;
• Eliminate 30% of project cost;
• Ensure success of global sourcing strategies; and,
• Dramatically improve customer experience

About iRise
iRise is the world’s leading provider of visualization software for business applications.  Visualization has become a critical competitive advantage for businesses to more effectively communicate their needs to technology teams and give everyone involved the ability to interact with and fully experience applications before they are built.  Companies of all sizes like General Motors, UPS, Wachovia, Manpower, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and many others use iRise to “test drive” their applications before building, which accelerates time to revenue, improves customer experience, and drives costs down.  At iRise, our vision is that by 2020, all business software will be visualized before being built, the same way that every car, airplane, and building is visualized today.  Headquartered in El Segundo, Calif., iRise is backed by Morgan Stanley Venture Partners, and Deutsche Bank, and has sales offices across North America.

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iRise is a registered trademark of iRise. All other companies and products mentioned are trademarks and property of their respective owners.