Featured BizSpark Startup on Azure - Virtual Process

Interview with Patrick Pecorilli, CEO and Co-Founder of Virtual Process.

Web site: www.virtual-process.com

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

CEO and Co-Founder.

What is your company’s mission?

To introduce a paradigm shift in operational process management whereby a software solution is implemented within a handful of days and is fully functional with a pricing model that is substantially less and totally unrestrictive when compared to alternative IT-based solutions. By way of delivering a software solution that empowers working level resources to generate significant improvements in operational processes while reducing operational costs considerably when compared to the status quo.

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

Virtual process has created codeless programming software that is able to organize, create, execute and track any operational procedure in real time. Our intuitive GUI and modular building block architecture enables any user to build any procedure almost instantaneously without any knowledge of programming. Our cloud infrastructure permits all this data to be accessed in real time and globally. Our customer’s immediate benefits are: (a) employee empowerment (b) increased productivity (c) significant operational cost reductions (d) substantial total quality process improvements. One of our anchor features, namely “Total Traceability” has also led our customers to differentiate themselves further from their competition thereby enabling our clients expansion into new and untapped market segments. Our added value is focused on the following key areas: (a) Best-in-class Price-to-Value Ratio, (b) Industry Benchmark on Ease-of-Use, (c) First Rate Feature Set, (d) Rapid Deployment and (e) Fast Service Velocity.

The same software is also revolutionizing the test automation sector. We have cut the time and cost to create a test station by 90%.

Tell us about your Azure based solution.

We provide a fully integrated solution for customers that need a system to manage their operational procedures. We provide tools to organize, create, execute and track all kinds of processes. Since it is cloud based, it becomes very easy for our customers to share and track their different processes wherever they are on the planet. Many clients use the cloud not only to share their data internally but also with their customers.

How is Azure implemented in your solution?

We provide our customers with a fully integrated solution that takes care of everything; storage, database and web services to our entire clientele through the Azure platform. We have desktop software and a Silverlight web portal that are both connected to a web service. Both applications use the database information and storage files through the web service which is also hosted on the Azure platform.

How did you get excited about Azure?

We were looking for a cloud based platform to make it more reliable, easier and less expensive to operate our distributed system. Since all our applications are based in the .net framework, we were excited to see we could migrate all our existing applications and services seamlessly. We also wanted to reassure our clients that our platform was safe. The Microsoft name went a long way to helping us accomplish that goal.

 What were the Azure features that prompted you to decide to build on Azure?

The main features that made us switch to Windows Azure are as follows:  the ability to scale our platform for new customers, cost savings over using dedicated servers, the ability to publish and maintain our web services and web application and lastly the extreme reliability we can now easily provide to our customers.

What advice do you have for companies that are thinking about building in the cloud?

It is the future. The cloud enables small companies to compete with large enterprises. I believe that this is only the start to a platform that will change the way business is handled. The Azure cloud brings scalability, low cost, reliability and security. There are way too many advantages for a company not to consider the cloud

What is the one thing that you would like readers to take away about your Azure app?

It is a fully integrated and easy to implement system that manages all of their operational procedures. Customers increase productivity, improve quality, save time and money with no upfront cost and no services required to operate the software.