This week, Innotas is emerging from five years of stealth mode to introduce a simplified, hosted version of PPM for smaller organizations. In short, the company is aiming to become the Salesforce.com of project portfolio management.
Our philosophy is aimed at the end user, not the CIO, said recently-named CEO Keith Carlson.
While in obscurity, the company was called Project Arena and never took anything except angel funding. But over the years, it did accumulate a base of 50 customers, comprising a total of 2000 seats paying monthly subscriptions of $65 per user.
When it went cash flow positive last year, it secured $5.5 million Series A funding and subsequently named Accenture veteran Carlson as CEO.
The product itself is designed with an Ajax, rich web interface that helps you redraw and add data to reports. With the current release, they are adding so-called best practices, which amount to a series of project approval workflow templates and prebuilt dashboards and reports.
Realizing that most of its target customer base probably uses Microsoft Project, Innotas has built-in integration so you can automatically read in project schedules, tasks, and deliverables.
With the funding and new executive and sales teams in place, Carlson’s goal is to get to about 150 customers and 25,000 seats within three years. And the company will continue its process of issuing new releases every six to 10 weeks. Part of that involves increasing web services support to tie in with customer apps, plus more configurable dashboards.
While the company could not pre-announce future tie-ins, a likely sweet spot would be Salesforce’s App Exchange, which provides a third party vendor marketplace hitting the same SMB market within Innotas’ sights.
At App Exchange, it would run into Rally Software, whose agile development planning tools would form a logical alternative to Microsoft Project for feeding project data to Innotas.
On the other hand, there might be potential overlap or competition with Product Manager, a new Rally offering also hosted by Salesforce that provides planning tools for product managers, marketers, and business analysts within IT organizations.
