Startup of the Day - dezineforce

The BizSpark startup of the day is dezineforce, based in the UK. You will find below an interview with Prof. Simon Cox, Chief Scientist of dezineforce. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!

Website: www.dezineforce.com.

Interview with Prof. Simon Cox, Chief Scientist of dezineforce

Tell us who you are and your role in the company.

Chief Scientist. With a highly talented and motivated team of staff, I focus on ensure that we remain at the cutting edge of innovation, so our customers, in turn, can remain at the leading edge of their sectors and can compete in a global marketplace.

What did you do before creating your company?

I am Professor of Computational Methods and Director of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing in the School of Engineering Sciences at the University of Southampton. The company is based on a more than a decade of research and development with colleagues at the University.

How do you feel being the most promising ‘Startup of the Day’ per Microsoft BizSpark?

It’s exciting to be working with Microsoft’s tools, technologies and platforms to enable scientists and engineers to solve the complex problems that we face as a society. BizSpark has been essential to enabling us to do this and deliver value to our customers.

What is your company’s mission?

Empowering technical professionals through speed and simplicity.

In 140 characters or less, tell us what your company does:

We enable scientists and engineers to perform large scale compute and data intensive calculations in the cloud or on their own on-site cloud. We enable technical professionals to focus on applying their expert knowledge of science, engineering, or financial calculations rather than on the large scale IT required to perform these complex calculations.

How did you get the idea for your company?

Sophisticated computer simulations are used in many sectors of industry (biosciences, computer aided engineering, electronic design, finance, geosciences, etc) to reduce the high cost of prototyping and experiments and to provide better answers to complex problems in less time. Our aim is make the technology required for these computer experiments simple to use and available over the web or on site through flexible and powerful tools.

Tell us about your funding history. Are you currently looking for funding? If so, how much?

We secured Series A funding of 1.8 Million pounds in February 2008.

How many employees do you have? How many developers?

We have 12 employees and 4 developers.

Are you hiring? If yes, what are you hiring and where?

Not hiring at present.

Which platform are you building on? Why?

Windows HPC Server 2008; Microsoft SQL Server 2005/ 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Workflow Foundation and Silverlight. We develop using Visual Studio and the .NET framework. We chose these as they enable rapid development and deployment for dezineforce and our customers. This combination of tools provides us with a robust, secure and reliable platform. In all cases they have best-of-breed functionality compared with the alternatives we have considered.

Where do you see opportunities today in the Software/internet area?

Two areas will be key to enabling ongoing innovation in science and engineering (1)“Software + Services” & “Platform as a Service” and (2) new opportunities for individuals and companies to collaborate to solve the complex challenges we face collectively as a society.

What do you think about the BizSpark Program?

BizSpark and fantastic support from a wide range of UK and US teams has shown us the true passion that Microsoft has for its technologies. The program has given us access to a huge range of tools and platforms that have significantly improved our ability to deliver to our customers.

Do you have any advice for young Software entrepreneurs?

“Fortitude, Fortitude, Fortitude” is what my mentor John Baits kept telling me in the years of hard work leading to the formation of the company and its current success. He keeps telling me it too!

Who’s your role model?

A cross between Charles Babbage & Piet Mondrian: computation and simplicity!

What’s the ONE THING you would like readers to take away from this interview

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.