Planview Takes Integration Partnership to the Next Level

I had the privilege of seeing an old friend at Pervasive Software’s IntegratioNEXT conference—Louise Allen, the VP of Product Management at Planview—who was among the InnovatioNEXT Award winners.

I first met Louise when she was with another Austin TX-based company, QuickArrow, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor focused on the Professional Services Automation (PSA) market.

At Planview, Louise has taken on an even bigger challenge. The company is offering a Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solution which competes with the largest companies in the industry—Microsoft, Oracle, HP, CA and SAP. Planview doesn’t only compete with these major players, its solutions have to interoperate with many of their applications and databases as well.

Compounding these competitive challenges is the fact that Planview is also in the midst of migrating to a SaaS model, one of the toughest tasks for an established, independent software vendor (ISV).

Louise gave a terrific breakout session presentation at IntegratioNEXT, which she summarized in an interview she and I videotaped, which discussed why integration partnership is essential to Planview’s success, and how Planview has used Pervasive Software’s embedded integration capabilities to gain a competitive advantage against its far bigger opponents in the market.

Effective PPM is dependent on data feeds from a variety of sources. As a result, many companies either shy away from using a PPM solution or face significant front-end consulting time and expense implementing PPM capabilities because of the extensive data integration effort required.

Planview recognized that it couldn’t let these integration issues get in the way of its sales and marketing success. As a result, Planview made a strategic decision to focus its limited internal resources on developing a superior software application and partner with an expert to address the integration issues.

Planview chose Pervasive because of its extensive integration expertise in traditional on-premise and rapidly evolving “cloud” environments; its portfolio of flexible connectors and tools; and its willingness to dedicate resources to support Planview’s customers and staff.

Planview has not only embedded Pervasive Data Integrator into its product suite, it also takes advantage of Pervasive’s SkyTap Cloud-based Demo Environment which has become an integral part of its sales process. In fact, Louise reported that Planview has conducted over 80 demos on the SkyTap site which have achieved over 45% close rates and over 70% attach rates for Pervasive’s integration solution.

Planview has conducted over 80 demos on the SkyTap site which have achieved over 45% close rates and over 70% attach rates for Pervasive’s integration solution.

Btw, Planview has also succeeded in generating over 50% of its new revenues from its new SaaS solution.

Planview’s strategic decision to embed integration into its solution has not only produced measurable business benefits, but earned the company Magic Quadrant recognition from Gartner who stated, “Planview is a leader based on completeness of vision and ability to execute.” Forrester has also declared,“Planview is the current offering leader” in the PPM market.

It is for these reasons that Planview was named an InnovatioNEXT Award winner.

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