Posted on 05 Dec 2006
I came across a press release stated that another software company specialize in project management has secured $7 Million in first-round funding from Benchmark Capital and Carmel Ventures. This company namely Clarizen, was a developer of innovative on-demand and enterprise-grade in the project management field. They run their software model as SaaS (Software as a Service) business model. This is the pay-as-you-use model where licensing & services bundle together with technical and operational support offered by a particular software provider. It seems that all the new software start-ups are coming out with SaaS models and they have secured funds from venture capitalists as well.
One interesting fact is the project management market is not a niche market and there are several players are competing for the market leadership. Though Clarizen is still in Alpha status, I feel it successfully captured funds from venture capitalists is significant in more than one way. However, the pricing hasn’t been put up on its Web site at the time of writing this post and I believed Clarizen would come out an attractive pricing strategy to penetrate their target market and outperform their potential rivals.
eProject is an existing competing player that is comparable to much of what Clarizen is going to launch with; eProject is the leading provider of on-demand collaborative project and portfolio management SaaS in the market. In a eProject’s press release, one of its popular products, eLounge has becoming fastest-growing online community for collaborative project and portfolio management. eProject also secured $6 million in new financing recently as announced in its press release. This new investment closes out a $10.5 million Series A funding round led by Kennet Venture Partners LLC, a leading transatlantic venture capital firm. Genevest, a Switzerland based global technology investment firm, also participated in the Series A round.
Frankly it’s still too early to conclude which one of the aforesaid software providers is the better choice for the potential customers. However, I can foresee there will be a lot of SaaS project management softwares to be launched in the coming few years, but I wonder are we ready for this type of softwares?
