Sukh Grewal
Founder and CEO, Grey Wall Software LLC

Veoci, developed by Grey Wall Software LLC, is a web and mobile emergency response system that enables effective team collaboration and response during crisis situations and other disruptive events. It does this by building on the latest innovations in interpersonal communication, enterprise collaboration and social media concepts, combining them into a seamless, organic whole.

Veoci grew from the experience of the six founders of Grey Wall Software in creating and operating the world’s largest enterprise social network – GE’s SupportCentral. At GE we transformed the latest innovations in collaboration and communication into software that would make it easier to get work done. In due time, SupportCentral became the most used software at GE (second only to email), with 400,000 users and in 20 languages. SupportCentral was itself representative of the new style of “social” software development: it provided collaborative development with customers, transparency of the development process and, at the same time, SaaS with a two-week revision cycle.

SupportCentral’s success did come with an unintended consequence:  we received a flood of communications when things went wrong. Our users knew too well how to reach us. Given that SupportCentral hosted thousands of mission-critical processes and associated data, at the slightest hint of disruption our screens would light up with messages from all over the world: Who should we contact, and what if they’re not reachable? When do we escalate this? Why did this happen again? Ultimately, we found ourselves asking: How can we make this system better?

These questions led to an interest in crisis response planning and tools. When we made the decision to expand the impact of our expertise beyond GE, it was clear that we needed to combine our capabilities as a software development team with our experiences in incident response, business continuity, disaster recovery and risk mitigation. We began to look back on our experience to brainstorm ways to make our responses to emergencies more organized, more efficient and less error prone.

The result is Veoci, the virtual emergency operations center for the 21st century. Veoci facilitates multi-team communications, gathering resources, multiple simultaneous hotspots and asset deployment. It draws upon the strengths of social media (instantaneous, simultaneous communication), enterprise collaboration (structured, organized workflow and data collection) and cloud computing (rapid growth to meet demand), and provides a balanced combination of patent-pending chat enhancements, full mobile capabilities (including mobile app, SMS, phone camera photos, GPS), task management, document management and customizable forms.

We brought to Veoci the rapid deploy cycle used with SupportCentral — based on lean application development and takt time concepts (matching pace of production with customer demand). A new version of Veoci is rolled out every two weeks in a highly disciplined process of code development and testing. Such a quick cycle requires extraordinary discipline. We believe that the short two-week cycle software development process has a profound effect in the areas of cost, quality and cycle time.

For the past two months we have been presenting Veoci to a diverse set of emergency and business continuity planning managers – towns and municipalities, universities, large and small corporations, airlines and airports, and even event planners. The response has been uniformly positive: as one emergency manager put it, the Veoci difference is “a disciplined response versus improvising and heroics.”

Currently, Veoci is in production and we are rapidly incorporating customer feedback, producing new versions every two weeks.

Please visit http://veoci.com for more information.