Pacific Edge Software

Software Magazine, Summer, 2002

When executives of Pacific Edge Software engaged in some market research on project portfolio management (PPM) in the last half of the year, some ideas were resonating with customers and some were not. From those discussions with CIOs, managers in project management offices and new product development staff came a clear idea of what customers wanted.

Pacific Edge has found that precise data at every level of detail about what IT investments were being made was not necessarily what was needed. The most valuable information was more along the lines of whether all the projects under way were practical to pursue? Should some be dropped? Do the projects make business sense? Do the projects have a home? Does the project fulfill some part of the business strategy? Are there too many "frontier" projects and not enough "maintenance/utility" projects?

These ideas are embodied in two new product releases from Pacific Edge, Portfolio Edge 1.0, and Project Office 3.2. Portfolio Edge is a Web-based "dashboard" aimed at senior managers, which delivers a set of standard charts and indicators derived from information in the Project Office repository. The charts can be customized and configured, or new ones can be set up. The product represents a major enhancement to the Web-based reporting capability of the previous version of Project Office.

Pricing for Project Office is a server-based model, tiered by the number of users and typically starting with 50. So customers typically pay from $50,000 to $100,000 based on the number of modules employed. Larger engagements may be over $500,000, and consulting services may make up 30-40 percent of the price. Portfolio Edge is priced as a percentage of the investment on top of Project Office.

www.pacificedge.com