Blueprint accelerates leadership position in requirements definition and visualization
Toronto, Canada - May 28, 2010: Blueprint Software Systems Inc. ("Blueprint"), the market leading requirements software provider, today announced that the company has closed $14.3M in financing from existing investors Walsingham Fund, BDC, and Growthworks, including $9.3M closed this week. The new investment will be used to respond to growing customer demand by accelerating the development of the Blueprint Requirements Center™ product line and expanding customer support, sales and marketing.
"We are pleased with Blueprint's progress and strongly believe the company is on the cusp of explosive market adoption of requirements definition solutions over the next two to three years," commented Alisha Hirsch, Partner at Walsingham Fund. "Blueprint's great technology coupled with strong leadership and talent across the organization will carry Blueprint through the finishing line in pole position."
Company Achieves 100 Customer Milestone
In 2010, IT organizations are undertaking the most challenging software projects that modernize their applications to improve cost efficiency, reduce time-to-market, and handle the growing problem of technology obsolescence. For these mission critical projects, failure is not an option. Blueprint has seen accelerating adoption of its software in the Global 2000 as they focus on improving their approach to requirements definition and validation to prevent project failure and overrun. Improvements in requirements authoring and communication dramatically improves stakeholder collaboration and understanding between business and IT teams, and will allow many organizations to scale their adoption of promising Agile software development approaches to larger, more complex and distributed projects.
"We spoke with many Blueprint customers who told us that transforming requirements was the most strategic investment for the business," said Theresa Lanowitz, CEO of voke Inc. "The Blueprint solution is easy to justify and the strategic value of the solution far outweighs the cost. Enterprises committed to improving efficiency and driving customer value need to ensure business owners and application teams work together and leverage a platform that visualizes requirements to deliver the business what it needs."
Blueprint Accelerates Product Roadmap
As part of the announced funding, Blueprint is accelerating research and development efforts on its core product line. Addressing the problems introduced as the pace of distributed and agile software development accelerates, Blueprint plans to leverage next generation technologies and pervasive connectivity to further align IT and the business and allow secure ubiquitous cloud access to Blueprint software anywhere in the organization. Blueprint's core product line will also be enhanced and extended to allow further depth and breadth of definition and simulation capabilities, role-based access and workflows, and deeper MSOffice and ALM integrations.
According to an independent April 2009 Forrester Research, Inc report, Just Do It: Modernize Your Requirements Practices, "developing sound requirements is one of the most important aspects of any software development project. When requirements are clear, concise, and comprehensive, all other aspects of the process are easier and more successful."
"Blueprint has come of age," commented David Nyland, CEO of Blueprint. "We now have over 100 customers using Blueprint Requirements Center, and most are large, complex corporations feeling a lot of pain with project overrun and failure, and a strained relationship between the business and IT. With the support of our investors, we are ready to scale and advance our product roadmap to allow more customers to experience the benefits and ROI of our software. Advancements in our next major release will bring major new capabilities including cloud-based delivery and end user adoption accelerators, which will allow for both increased scaling of adoption in large enterprise as well as delivery to smaller corporations through distribution channels."
About Blueprint
Named a Gartner "Cool Vendor" in Application Development, recognized as a 2009 Innovator by voke Research, and winner of the 2009 Jolt Excellence Award in Design and Modeling, Blueprint is a global leader in requirements, delivering the industry's first requirements workbench purpose built for today's software requirements authors. Blueprint's product, Requirements Center™, empowers authors and reviewers to visually define, simulate, validate, and publish requirements for context and comprehension-rich collaboration with increasingly distributed and 3rd-party stakeholders– from the capture of business process definitions and textual requirements, to all the way through more complex use cases, data, business rules, UI simulations and complete test case generation. Blueprint solutions eliminate requirements errors and misunderstanding, and enables companies to deliver software projects faster, with less cost and rework, and with greater user satisfaction. Blueprint is a global provider, headquartered in Canada, and with presence, partners and customers in North America and Europe.