


Started in 2004 by Ken Lippe and Martin Wolfram as a specialized business consulting firm focused on expert consulting, the company made an early pivot towards using technology to augment their expertise. “This grew our business intelligence (BI) and application development capabilities which in turn has been used to deliver custom line of business solutions for clients,” says Wolfram. While winning hearts with the data integration and analytics solutions, a compelling user interface (UI) was lacking. This led to investments in graphic and user experience design teams—making Windows and cross platform apps visually appealing and intuitive.
In addition to the visual appearance, Wolfram further elucidates about the light weight wrapper on top of existing applications that increase productivity— Apportals. This app framework is used to drive a common experiences across different form factors and platforms. “The principles for a successful Apportal includes having a beautiful modern UI, taking advantage of existing and legacy infrastructure, applications and data, while exploiting emerging interfaces like touch or voice where it makes sense,” reckons Wolfram. Apportals provide a quick win by enabling new and old solutions to exist side by side in a cohesive manner. “This set up also enables IT leaders the runway to replace aging systems over time in a way that is invisible to users,” says Wolfram. Inviso’s Apportals leverage the latest in Windows 10 technology to organize and surface data, apps and content in a way that is personalized and role-specific for business users in almost any industry. This provides a cost effective mechanism to bring everything together for a user in one place with a common look and feel.
In addition, the company has a unique developer tool box that decreases time and complexity to solve common blockers all while improving performance and usability using the libraries for Visual Studio. The toolkit encapsulates best practices and approaches to design and develop Windows applications. “It will also simplify implementing the mechanics to achieve the desired UI effects and allow partners to focus more on effective experience design when solving business problems for the clients,” narrates Wolfram.
One illustrative scenario involved a company’s sales and executive management having different views on things like revenue landed, marketing opportunities and lead conversion.
The modern Windows application surfaced this wide array of data and brought it up to a single screen leveraging live tiles. As a result, users could drill through the live tile to call systems and act with the core systems that existed. “It also enabled a common system of reporting to be made and ensured data security,” Wolfram adds.
Another area of focus for Inviso is software asset management (SAM) solutions. By leveraging extensive technical and subject-matter expertise, Inviso merges intelligent IT operations data collection with the power of the Microsoft business intelligence technology stack. This comprehensive discovery process combined with deep Microsoft licensing expertise ensures a clear view of compliance requirements. “We leverage Microsoft solutions in a few different ways in delivering our SAM services to customers,” Wolfram notes. Firstly—many customers employ Microsoft enterprise management solutions such as Active Directory, System Center and Hyper-V—that are key data sources to extract licensing related hardware and software metrics during the discovery process. Secondly, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) toolkit is a free solution offered by Microsoft—which, when used strategically, can be an extremely valuable secondary discovery tool, in place of agent-based solutions like ConfigMgr. Thirdly, the company’s Inviso Software Analyzer (InvisoSA) is proprietary platform, developed to scale discovery procedures and reporting capabilities, built on Microsoft technologies.
Inviso SAM Managed Service is an annual subscription service that helps organizations manage and optimize software assets. “Our consultants assist customers in not only understanding their current environment and maintaining compliance, but also improving SAM procedures, optimizing infrastructure and configurations, and reducing overall licensing costs over time,” explains Wolfram. Inviso measures its success not just in terms of compliance and costs savings, but also by an organization’s ability to independently manage their day-to-day SAM procedures and IT environment going forward.
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We spend a great portion of time integrating what is already built, in new ways. We constantly challenge ourselves to think outside of the box
What’s next for Inviso? The company is keen on doing exciting things in the sports science field—by bringing together Power BI and Azure stream analytics to drive real time reporting. “A main focus will be on sport science applications,” says Wolfram. The company is also driving toward a greater mix of SaaS revenue streams versus pure services—along with more cloud migrations and new cloud-only solutions.
Company
Inviso Corporation
Headquarters
Bellevue, WA
Management
Martin Wolfram, Co Founder & CEO
Description
Specializes in application development, business intelligence, marketing,
consulting and software asset management consulting and software asset
management