Kantata published a study commissioned from Forrester Consulting that investigated how the professional services automation market is evolving towards vertical SaaS solutions. It advocates that professional services firms should look for software vendors dedicated to the industry rather than a solution and vendors that do everything.
Procore, the project management solution for consulting firms, is to open an EMEA hub in Dublin, where it aspires to employ hundreds of employees in time. It also appointed a new leader for the European headquarters.
Asana sold $350 million of its Class A common stock to Dustin Moskovitz, Asana’s President, CEO, and Chair of the Board of Directors, in a private placement. Effectively this raises $350 million that the company will use for working capital and other general corporate purposes. The stock’s closing price determined the price as of 2nd September 2022 of $18.16.
The share price was well below the high of 141.66 in November 2021. Moskovitz has seen the value climb slightly to $24.66 as of Friday, 9th September. It climbed slightly higher to $24.70 after hours. The figure represents just under 10% of the company.
Moskovitz commented: “I am investing further in Asana because I strongly believe the market opportunity is enormous and that the Work Graph is the best possible solution for helping enterprises achieve their most important goals. The market is ready and our customers are validating our strategy every day. With the additional $350 million in capital announced today, we believe we are fully-funded to execute on our current strategies and well-positioned to reach free cash flow positive before the end of calendar 2024.”
Asana also announced record Q2 2023 results. Revenue growth climbed by 51% year over year to $134.9 million. It saw even higher growth from its larger customers. Moskovitz commented: “This quarter we beat our revenue guidance by 6 per cent and non-GAAP operating loss guidance by 14 per cent. Growth was driven by large enterprise deals and momentum in the US, with the number of customers spending $100,000 or more on an annualized basis up 105 percent. We believe that Asana is the most scalable work management platform out there, as evidenced by our broad deployment and millions of users worldwide, including our largest customer deployment of over 100,000 paid seats.”
The acquisition makes more sense when considering the losses sustained by Asana. The GAAP net loss was $113.0 million, compared to the GAAP net loss of $68.4 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2022. Free cash flow was negative $42.3 million, compared to negative $9.3 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2022. Will Moskovitz continue the growth strategy, or will he turn off the tap as the world heads into a recession? The need for organisations to automate processes and work management plays into the work Graph that Asana has developed. Still, it is a huge risk for the company if it continues to bleed money at the rate it is doing so. Moskovitz has provided three-quarters of losses. It is noteworthy that the announcement did not state that growth would be accelerated further.
Kantata
Kantata released the latest update for Kantata OX adding milestone weighting to a new task tracker. The feature enables customers to assign a weighting percentage to each milestone task. It enables companies to forecast revenues better within the billing cycle. Rather than a simple division across five milestones within a project, organisations can weigh deliverables differently.
Other updates include minor UI improvements to resource management. These include better visibility of the task start and due dates in the resource centre. All project participants now appear in the resourcing tab rather than just names and unnamed resources. There were also minor bug fixes within project management and the Time and Expense module.
Precursive
Precursive launched its Summer 22 release. This release includes three new features:
- Precursive Mobile App
- Grouping Resources & Requests
- Weekly & Monthly Capacity Overview
The new Precursive mobile app enables timesheets, expenses, approvals and holiday requests. Users can create and amend timesheets, expenses and approvals. Managers can then approve these to ensure faster customer invoicing, faster payment to employees and better visibility of holidays for resource managers.
The new Grouping feature enables resource managers to view and plan resource allocations quickly. Groupings are available by name, role and department, enabling the resource manager to have a quick view of the availability of each group of resources.
The new weekly and monthly capacity overview gives resource managers a 360º view of the overall capacity for the week and month.
The release also includes several feature improvements. These include project archiving, even if they have unapproved timesheet line items. It is now possible to deactivate a time code, and where a consultant has more than one role in a project, the timesheet will auto-complete information if a new row is added.
Screendragon
We Are Unity, the Australian agency that ‘unites strategy, brand and culture to realise your most audacious aspirations’, has selected Screendragon to improve its operations. We Are Unity will deploy Screendragons to manage estimating, resources and timesheets to deliver a complete view of its project health. It will integrate the existing CRM and finance solution (Enterprise Times believes this is Xero) to enable opportunities to convert to projects and streamline the opportunity-to-cash process.
PSA PPM and Work Management news from the week beginning 29th August 2022
