Jeff Pancottine, President & CEO, Discusses the Evolution of eProject to Daptiv

I recently spent a few minutes with Jeff to talk about the choice to change our name from eProject to Daptiv, and what it means for us as a company as well as to our customers.  Here’s an excerpt of our conversation:
 

Tim: Why are you changing your company name from eProject to Daptiv?

Jeff: We wanted a name that was somewhat less specific than eProject—one that would allow us to continue to provide the world’s leading on-demand project portfolio management software, while also giving us more flexibility to introduce new services in the future.  We also felt that the timing was right.  We’ve had a phenomenal couple of years from a growth standpoint, and these things only get more difficult the bigger you become.

Tim:  What does Daptiv mean?

Jeff:  Well, as I mentioned we were looking for a name that was less specific, and that would be flexible as we grow our business.  I think Daptiv evokes some things, but it’s not intended to “mean” anything.  You’ll notice that even the typography of our new brand identity is a little bit casual, a little bit playful.  We wanted an iconic brand, but also one that was approachable, and didn’t seem stodgy.  I would be happy to hear from our customers, both old and new.  Feel free to share with me what the name Daptiv has come to mean to you and your organization.

Tim:  Does this mean that you are still innovating in the project portfolio management market?

Jeff:  Yes, absolutely.  We see projects and teams and portfolios as critical components to successfully manage work in the mid-office.  We will continue to focus on delivering the best on-demand PPM software.

Tim: You mentioned the ‘mid-office’.  Tell me more about that.

Jeff: Organizations have spent the past 20 years adding sophisticated technology to their business to manage transactions and reporting for back office financials and inventory, etc. and more recently, for customer interactions and transactions through CRM tools like Salesforce.com.  The work that happens in an organization that’s not front office or back office, is what we call the MID OFFICE, and it’s where organizations’ competitive strengths lie.  We think there’s enormous potential for organization to approach the teamwork and strategic initiatives, and yes, ‘projects’ in their business with a similar set of enterprise tools that also provide visibility via reporting, dashboards, quick and easy custom views and the like. So whether this is an IT portfolio, or a new product development and go to market process, or whether it’s planning for an acquisition, we think software can do more for organizations in the mid-office.

Tim:  Is the company’s ownership changing?

Jeff:  No, we continue to be a privately held company based in Seattle, and our new brand is a way for us to articulate a richer value-based story that includes project and portfolio management, but also goes beyond it to embody the idea of managing not just projects, but work. 

Tim:  What is Daptiv doing beyond PPM?

Jeff: Event in our current PPM service, Daptiv PPM, you can see that our set of tools provides not just project portfolio management applications, and things like resource management, which are core elements of the PPM software market; it also touches on the interconnected requirements of really managing work—things like integral collaboration services, the ability to create ‘DIY’ or do-it-yourself applications that actually map to business processes and needs that you have—which are perhaps adjacent to the core project portfolio management elements, but also relate to managing work in the enterprise.

Tim:  What do you think makes Daptiv different from other PPM software vendors, and more broadly from other tools people use to manage their day to day work?

Jeff: We have a mantra at Daptiv—it’s 4 words--YOU-WORK-EASY-ON-DEMAND.  These really embody how we are driving our business, and how we are offering value to our customers in helping them address the real business management challenges they face.

You—is important because we see business software changing and evolving.  10 years ago, it was ok to design software with a bad UI because with back office applications, there were relatively few users interacting regularly with the system.  Today--and especially since we focus on managing work—we have thousands of individuals interacting with our software every hour.  This means that we need to think about how it feels to you.  Whether you are a C-level executive just logging in for a dashboard snapshot, or whether you are a team member on a new product development project, we believe that the software should allow you to make the choice about how you view it, how you interact with your data, and be flexible enough to accommodate that.

Work—represents the evolution of our focus on projects.  We’ve come to understand that while organizations definitely want better tools to manage “projects”, they also really need better tools to manage work that might not be structured as a project.  Our mission is not to make everyone into a project manager, it’s to help our customers better manage their work so that they can compete effectively.  The mid-office has been largely relegated to the use of personal productivity tools—and these are great for the work you do alone.  But the huge opportunity for organizations is to link personal and organizational productivity, and this can only happen with an integrated environment where tools for your own heads-down work come together with the bigger objectives your organization is trying to meet.  This is where our new capabilities for Work Intelligence really shine.  Not only does Daptiv give your teams tools to manage day to day work, but it now provides you with an easy way to report on share and visualize data to help understand what’s actually happening with the strategic work in your organization.

Easy—this is closely related to our focus on you.  It has become more important to make software easy and here’s why—it’s nice for the end user, and it helps them do their job better.  BUT, it has a bigger impact.  If our tools are easy to use, it means that our customers will have users actively contributing data to the environment.  This participation and contribution is what drives visibility into the work that’s happening in an organization, and ultimately allows managers to make much smarter decisions because they have better data.  It’s a two-fold payoff.

On-demand—this is perhaps the biggest change in the business software arena in the past decade.  The growing ubiquity of internet access means that organizations are no longer need to depend solely on their own IT departments.  They can now rent services for a duration that makes sense to their business, and the vendor (us!) handles uptime, hardware, maintenance, networking, access, etc.  All of these services are part of our delivery model, and you as a customer do not have to worry about it.  With on-premise software, you have to procure hardware, install software, update software, update servers, re-start servers and monitor the operating environment.  This takes employees, often several people, and of course you have to pay their salaries and benefits.  You also have to pay for power to run these systems and cool these systems.  Increasingly, savvy organizations are realizing that on-demand business software makes sense.  With software as a service (SaaS) you focus on your business process and their unique competitive differentiators, and leave the mundane aspects of service delivery to us.  You always have the latest and greatest features, and all you need to do is pay a monthly subscription and have a browser to access the service. 

Tim:  Thanks, Jeff.  Let’s do this again real soon!