Inviso Corporation: Building Stunning Line of Business Apps Using the Latest Microsoft Technologies

Business leaders are increasingly willing to exclude traditional IT from solution delivery. From a landscape perspective, user experience expectations have outpaced ITs capacity to deliver intuitive and seemingly simple technology solutions that span multiple devices. In order to create compelling solutions in the Microsoft landscape, it is necessary to have an entire ecosystem. This means the ability to run software on a large range of form factors, from things with small-to-large screen sizes to things that don’t have screens. It also involves enabling applications to communicate with largely scalable and connected environments like the cloud. Enter Inviso Corporation—a Bellevue, WA based consulting firm specializing in application development, business intelligence, marketing, consulting, and software asset management. Inviso strives to think creatively about ways to integrate existing solutions and investments or prevailing systems with new cloud offerings. “We spend a great portion of time integrating what is already built, in a new way. We constantly challenge ourselves to think outside of the box,” notes Martin Wolfram, Co-Founder and CEO, Inviso Corporation.

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.