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!