With a knack of automating professional services organizations and government contractors, Deltek has what it takes to steer these customers and ultimately reshape the way they manage the lifeblood of their operations – complex and long-term projects.
In fact, Deltek, which has been selling into project-focused organizations for nearly 30 years, is experiencing an upturn in its core market, enlarging its global presence, and realizing the benefits of its recent acquisitions.
After a long recession that has dealt a blow to its customers in professional services and government contractor verticals, Deltek is seeing shoots of green in areas that could hold the key to its future.
With its unrelenting focus on project-focused customers, Deltek’s perseverance has begun to pay off as it parlays its domain expertise into new market opportunities and expanded product offerings.
Kickstarting Insight
At Deltek Insight, its annual customer conference held recently in Nashville, Deltek announced its plans to take aim at fast-growing markets from on-demand applications delivery to real-time analytics, while shoring up the project management and market-research capabilities of its long-time government contractor customers.
The key announcements included Deltek First, the vendor’s on-demand applications for small and mid-sized government contractors. Leveraging its industry-specific knowledge and the framework from its GCS accounting solution, Deltek First offers robust project accounting and reporting, time and expense collection, and fixed assets capabilities, along with viagra development and market intelligence add-ons.
Under a partnership with BI vendor QlikTech, Deltek has introduced Deltek Costpoint Analytics, a dashboard and analytics solution for professional services organizations to better track project performance, manage budgets and optimize profitability with the use of advanced business intelligence.
The vendor also introduced Deltek PM Compass, which allows program managers and project leaders in the government contractor space to have an aggregated view into complex programs. It augments their capabilities with automated workflows, alerts and notifications, as well as built-in data-mining and other tools to help them manage programs from one central location.
These announcements kickstarted a new growth period for Deltek following its recent acquisitions, product enhancements, and more importantly the expansion of its industry content and international operations.
Compelling Synergy
In March 2011 Deltek acquired Washington Management Group including its FedSources, complementing its INPUT business, which enables companies to identify and develop new business opportunities with public sector organizations. Combining its GovWin software with market intelligence and business development tools from FedSources and INPUT allows Deltek customers to have a better shot at winning government contracts.
Last year Deltek also acquired Maconomy, which has established a major foothold in Europe and other regions with its full suite of applications designed for automating financial and project management functions at professional services organizations especially those involved in marketing communications, public relations, as well as accounting, consulting, and legal services.
In the first quarter of 2011, half of its biggest deals came from international sales as a result of the Maconomy acquisition. Hill and Knowlton, Leo Burnett and Ogilvy Public Relations are among Maconomy’s long-time clients.
Deltek’s flagship product Vision, which offers localized versions in Dutch, French, and Spanish, has enjoyed global acceptance with recent wins including Valstar Simonis, a Dutch engineering company with 85 employees. Tauw, a large engineering firm in the Benelux region, has standardized on a full suite of Deltek’s CRM, ERP and project management applications.
With an installed base of more than 14,500 customers and 1.8 million users, Deltek caters to architecture, engineering and construction firms as well as a slew of government contractors and professional services organizations that rely on the vendor to manage their back-office and increasingly customer-facing operations.
Moving upmarket
Though many of its customers are considered small and midsized companies, Deltek has also succeeded in selling into big firms including SAIC, one of its major accounts that has 40,000 users running its applications.
In fact the acquisition of Maconomy, which already offers multicurrency and local statutory support, has enabled Deltek to pursue bigger deals. Two of its major deals in the first quarter of 2011 came from organizations with more than 5,000 employees.
Regardless of their size, what these companies have in common is that because of the nature of their projects, whose duration can stretch from weeks to years, their business processes for costing, compliance and project management have grown in complexity.
Budget cuts from government agencies, coupled with increased competition, are also forcing Deltek users to look for better business development, customer relationship management and analytical tools to help them identify, pursue and capture new market opportunities.
As a result, the new products and services ranging from on-demand applications delivery to off-the-shelf analytics and Maconomy’s offerings for big professional services organizations underscore the integrated approach by Deltek.
By addressing the needs of professional services organizations holistically, Deltek is taking the high road similar to the transformation under way among its customers, which have had their share of mergers and acquisitions in order to achieve the economy of scale needed to replicate successful projects across sectors and geographies.
Deltek is replicating such best practices as well. For example, integration between Deltek Vision and Maconomy People Planner for resource management is under way. The same applies to consolidating the databases between content repositories from INPUT and FedSources.
Sustaining Momentum
Deltek’s recovery is still a work in progress and any sustainable organic growth will depend on the health of its mainstay – millions of small and midsized professional services organizations that subsist on a mix of government and commercial projects.
With an eye toward integrating its acquisitions as well as delivering new and expanded offerings for everything from project management to business intelligence, Deltek is on the path of showing solid growth with increased revenues and expanded installations.
After peaking at $289 million in company revenues in 2008, Deltek’s sales slumped because of the recession. Now incremental contributions from its recent acquisitions will push Deltek’s business to new heights topping $360 million in 2011. The move toward on-demand delivery and global expansion will entail Deltek’s reaffirming its commitment toward project-focused organizations, while ensuring that it has the right solutions to exploit untapped opportunities in new regions.
