Virtual Solutions Ltd. is a Hungarian software development SME. We are developing CloudStorm - an innovative enterprise office automation and end user innovation platform.
The top priority of operational executives across all industries and geographies is meeting ever-increasing efficiency goals. This is even more pronounced in Shared Service Centres, where contracts enforce a 6-10% annual efficiency increase. Another top problem is finding and keeping the right talent, as finding skilled employees is getting harder. This is particularly true for the shared service center jobs that are generally rather repetitive by nature but still require skills and focus. SSCs are entering a wage war to attract employees from each other, which increases employee attrition and decreases overall efficiency of the sector.
To perform their work, SSC employees have to navigate several applications and excel sheets in their day-to-day activities to achieve simple tasks. Existing applications used in daily work are rigid and even the simplest change (e.g. adding an extra field for comments) takes 3-12 months due to overloaded IT departments. This results in a lot of shadow-databases in Excel and even more manual data-sync between existing apps and Excel databases, thus compromising data integrity and security. The user experience is bad and the work is repetitious. This in turn demotivates employees.
CloudStorm solves these problems with its innovative End User Innovation Tool, which enables Team Leaders and End Users to create automations to make their work more efficient and less boring (for example data entry automations, data retrieval (reporting) automations, etc.). Our solution builds on top of existing infrastructure and processes of the client, therefore can be implemented without switching cost. CloudStorm increases employee efficiency from day 1.
The CLOUDSTORM Phase 1 project focused on hypothesis testing, validation and business model development as well as developing a technology roadmap for the future. More specifically, our objectives were the following:
• Elaboration of a long term business plan to define the most profitable market strategy, validate our business model, and expand the CloudStorm community;
• Conducting an IPR study and legal assessment to support business plan development from brand strategy point of view and to investigate legal considerations of open sourcing software;
• Determining the key technical limitations and development areas by building up a larger community of beta users and extensively testing the CloudStorm framework and its paid features.
While CloudStorm technology has both developers and enterprises as target groups, we focused our efforts to uncover the problems, needs and business rationale of the paying customer side of our solution – the enterprise client – to support our go to market and quick growth strategy. The outcomes of our Phase 1 feasibility assessment are implemented directly into our product development roadmap, overall commercialization strategy, and a subsequent SME Instrument Phase 2 proposal
