How Crisis, Connection And The Cloud Inspired The Creation Of Cira Apps' SaaS Software

In the fallout from any national tragedy, there is inevitably a complicated, eclectic and chaotic mix of bewilderment, frustration and despair. Therefore, during the aftermath of what was arguably the most impactful terrorist attack in modern history - 9/11 - these emotions were piercing.

However, amidst this storm of confusion, there was a moment of clarity for Vern Weitzman, founder of Cira Apps Limited. While working as a BlackBerry and mobility consultant, Weitzman saw many enterprise data centers lose power or connectivity. This shut off the network infrastructure, rendering the employees' wireless devices useless.

Yet, on these old BlackBerry handhelds, if you knew another user's 8-digit PIN, you were able to send direct messages from device-to-device. But very few employees knew their fellow workers' PINs, and the entire system struggled to contend with the network outage. A modern day version of the BlackBerry PIN message is an SMS text message.

This highlighted to Weitzman the necessity of having automated contact updates for everyone in any organization. He understood that this would not only be of great value in times of emergency, but that it would also bolster day-to-day productivity.

Weitzman incorporated this into the itrezzo UCM server software developed by a company that he founded in 2001, which helps companies to manage their on-premise systems and servers. After having spent over 15 years developing and establishing itrezzo as a highly successful corporation, Weitzman decided to shift the synchronization approach from being exclusively on-premise to being carried in the cloud in 2016.

And so Cira Apps was born. This Azure-based platform is geared towards the automated synchronization of shared calendars and contacts across members of an organization. The aim behind this venture was to reduce the array of administrative difficulties that can arise when employees and managers do not have access to a shared contact lists or calendars. For example, one member of staff could update their availability on their own calendar, but on regular platforms, this is not updated across all relevant departments.

As part of the company's 'CiraHub' calendar-syncing element of the platform - various aspects of the business can be synchronized, so that whenever a meeting is set-up on the corporate calendar, everyone automatically has access to the live version of this. If a construction company has a vital milestone day on the horizon where the site will be inspected, for example, then they can alert all staff to the importance of not walking through the area and potentially creating a mess. Without CiraHub, this all has to be done through the time-consuming task of sending out blanket emails and manually alerting individual members of staff.

In founding Cira Apps, Weitzman is offering a comprehensive solution to a variety of administrative and productivity-related issues. Under the Cira Apps umbrella, there are the CiraSync and CiraHub platforms, which are particularly effective for company mergers and acquisitions. The automated, cloud-based synchronization makes life easier for IT teams that need to synchronize crucial data when combining with another company. Given the significantly increasing number of mergers and acquisitions taking place across the US, the importance of this software has never been greater.

For instance, if a smaller company is being absorbed by a larger corporation, the migration of the former's data usually requires days of manual imports and exports. With CiraSync and GALSync, companies are able to have this entire process automated, and the transfer can happen as soon as the acquisition has been completed.

For Vern Weitzman, Cira Apps is the culmination of decades' worth of work in the industry. He began his career as a software engineer for Control Data in 1981, before leaving in 1987 to start his first company, SessionWare which developed apps for local area networks. Through this firm, Weitzman gained experience migrating large companies such as CNN, Siemens and Levi Strauss to Microsoft Exchange.

It was this first-hand knowledge of the complications and complexities involved in any kind of data migration that opened Weitzman's eyes to the need for a simpler, more streamlined means of doing this. As well as helping to integrate automation as a way of making these processes more effective for teams and entire corporations alike, a key element of Cira Apps' mission can be traced back to Weitzman's original eureka moment that came as a result of data networking outages during 9/11.

"In an emergency, the number one rule is communications. Thus, it is absolutely essential for every team member in any organization to have all the necessary contact details. Employees know who to call and execute their recovery plans. What happens if they have lost their emergency contact list?

By providing the ability to synchronize all contact lists across the company, Cira Apps is ensuring that these details are kept updated at all times, without requiring manual maintenance and data hygiene.

"At the heart of the work we are doing at Cira Apps is a motivation to bolster productivity and eliminate unnecessary administrative challenges. But at the same time, we recognize that there is a fundamental safety concern that many companies do not pay adequate attention to. By easily maintaining contact lists and making these accessible across the organization through our software, we are striving to help change this, and to subsequently improve each individual employee's sense of safety," Weitzman concludes.