VirtualPremise Combines
Transaction and Lease Management

Promoting Adoption and Standardization... What's the biggest barrier to streamlining transaction management and lease administration? Well, according to Andy Thomas, President of VirtualPremise, it's not simply the rate of adoption of new technology by corporate real estate departments. An even bigger challenge often is the need to standardize data within an organization. And this becomes critically important as information is centralized.

VirtualPremise develops web-based software for managing the acquisition and disposition of space, as well as ongoing lease management. VirtualPremise uses an ASP (Application Service Provider) model, meaning that all the data resides on VirtualPremise's servers -- not inside a corporate firewall. According to Thomas, many corporate customers prefer to have this data outside their corporate firewall. That's because they have so many outside alliance partners and vendors interacting with the data that providing all of them access to it inside a corporate firewall would create a security headache.

Digitizing any paper-based process at a large real estate enterprise is a huge challenge requiring time and training. So it's not surprising that a major customer like Ford Land initially would sign up for a six-month pilot before reaching agreement to use VirtualPremise for its project and transaction management technology services worldwide. VirtualPremise has trained in-house Ford experts in the U.K., Germany and the U.S. In addition to a call center in Atlanta providing the human touch, VirtualPremise has built an extensive help system into its software, including the ability to launch WebEx recordings on how to execute certain tasks. But once an organization has implemented the system and centralized its data, setting benchmarks and improving the real estate process becomes much more achievable.

--Peter Pike