Innotas Delivers IT Project Management on Demand

Project portfolio management isn't the most obvious choice for outsourcing or software as a service. Unlike most enterprise software, its users tend to be IT staff, who often rate ease-of-use as less important than the features and fine-tuning capabilities of suites from a vendor like InventX, Project.net, or Troux. However, Innotas has successfully copied the SaaS business model of Salesforce.com and applied it to PPM: Though the Innotas service doesn't offer all the features of a full-featured project portfolio management suite, it can be rolled out faster and at a lower cost. The new application management capabilities will help Innotas broaden its customer base, as well as make PPM more accessible to users in departments other than IT. However, because it's based on a per-user pricing model, potential customers will need to think carefully about who they roll it out to. According to Innotas, most customers designate one person in each department (such as a manager) to handle PPM, rather than trying to enable it for every employee. Andy Dornan NWC Senior Technology Editor

Innotas this week said it is adding new application portfolio management (APM) capabilities to its suite of tools to help IT manage project development and maintenance.

The challenge for IT, says Innotas, is managing--and funding--ongoing legacy applications while also launching new strategic IT projects. Innotas delivers its software as a service, much like Salesforce.com, and adds the new APM capabilities to its existing Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software.

With its latest release, Innotas lets users track project management portfolios and application maintenance portfolios in one place. Customers can create as many IT portfolios as they wish, and they can dedicate one or several of these portfolios to application maintenance work.