I recently talked again with Tim Low, VP of Marketing at Daptiv, the firm formerly known as eProject. I wrote about the firm on this blog under its old name and Tim provided some very useful enterprise 2.0 success stories, see Enterprise 2.0 Examples of Managing Projects in the Tools and Food Industries.

The firm began in the late 90s as an online project management suite as part of the Web 1.0 wave. They survived the dotcom bust and have grown significantly recently as they have transitioned to web 2.0. Daptiv has taken on 200 new customers in the first three quarters of 2007 including, Chanel, ATA (the airline), Harry & David, Frontier Airways, and Bass Pro Shops. It is now moving beyond managing projects to broader enterprise collaboration around business processes and has rebranded itself to be better positioned for broader product coverage.

We discussed two topics, the rebranding process and the new Fall Edition of their flagship product. Having been through a number of rebranding efforts, I was interested in their experience. Tim said they wanted to speak to a broader audience beyond the project management people. They looked at brand names on a continuum from those that have a specific description such as their old name, eProject, or Microsoft and a completely fanciful name like Google.

They wanted to be closer to the fanciful end but with a touch of description. They wanted a name and logo that did not indicate old school but captured more of a new web feel. They started with 4,000 names, narrowed it to 40 and then to three finalists. Then they did due diligence on these three. They worked with a consultant and invited employee input. The final choice, Daptiv, has the “i” in a different color in the logo and I think it accomplishes their objectives. In addition to providing product flexibility, this type of name also helps with the search engines.

The Fall Edition of their current main product, Daptiv PPM, has some new features to expand its use as a collaborative work tool (PPM stands for portfolio project management). It is designed to help manage work and not simply projects. They were finding that clients were using their tool for more than project management, in part, because of its enterprise 2.0 qualities, and they wanted to make it easier to do this. They also found that some of the best use cases came from organizations that do not consider themselves project driven.

To better support the work process, Daptiv added a new layer of capabilities they refer to as “work intelligence” that facilitates reporting, analysis and dashboarding of work process in an accessible format. Daptiv brought in some of the functionality of Cognos to speed up the availability of these capabilities. They made the creation of custom versions of these capabilities within the reach of the business user without the need of IT support. They also allow for the integration of data from these work intelligence apps with their traditional project management apps.

Daptiv has found that one of the results of these new dashboards is the elevation of transparency further up the management levels within an organization. In one of their clients, the real estate and facilities management group uses a Daptiv work intelligence app to visualize their property acquisition and management process. They can easily see the status of acquisitions, the ratio of leased vs, owned, and spend per year in multiple categories.

Daptiv’s product direction is consistent with the trend of focused tools expanding their reach within enterprise 2.0 as both users and product developers discover new uses for the transparency and other features of these tools. I think this speaks to the power and flexibility of enterprise 2.0.