Pasadena: Where collaboration software meets the clouds

Have you ever been to sunny Pasadena, California? I was lucky enough to make a trip out there two weeks ago to visit the team at Central Desktop. Pasadena is a great city just northwest of LA on the foothills of the Sierra Madres and typically associated with The Rose Bowl and Cal Tech. Myself, my colleague Jess and our fearless leader Devon, had traveled out to Pasadena from Boston to spend a week shadowing, training, and learning from the Central Desktop internal sales and client services teams. Our goal was to come back to Boston with enough knowledge of the product and the sales cycle that we could effectively develop an outbound lead generation program. As a member of Central Desktops Boston Venture Capital Firm, we look to provide our portfolio companies with consultation and business growth strategies through our OpenView Venture Partners Labs team.

During our extensive training and shadowing we learned best practices processes, valuable product information and gained a great appreciation for the Central Desktop offerings. For those of you unfamiliar with Central Desktops offerings; they offer a pure SaaS collaboration platform that allows for multiple users to access configurable virtual rooms/workspaces where file sharing, file collaborating, project tasks, shared calendars, and real time discussions and events can be monitored and coordinated. The value of this offering is that, among some unique features, its users gain access to a complex content management, light project management and complete collaboration solution without any of the infrastructure or IT support/customization that often comes with implementation of one of the larger more robust solutions such as SharePoint or Lotus Notes. Yes; Central Desktop offers a 100% secure cloud solution. As we shadowed product specialist giving demos, listened to client service calls and spoke with the CEO, a few things became very clear to us. When a client purchases one of four of Central Desktop’s offerings with the understanding of exactly what it is capable of, they are taken back by how it effectively streamlines their business processes. For more information on their offerings and some interesting publicity check out the article in the Pasadena-Star.

On our second day in Pasadena I was flipping through a USA Today at the hotel when I noticed a front page article in the Business section titled “Software-as-a-service gives small businesses powerful tools.” I immediately began to read this article as it related to much of what we have been covering with Central Desktop. Sure enough, out of the thousands of SaaS solutions currently out there, Central Desktop was mentioned as a cost-effective SaaS collaboration solution for small to mid size business who don’t want to, nor should have to, pay a large up front licensing fee. With a product like Central Desktop a company doesn’t need to pay for the infrastructure, or for the utility costs of running servers, or take away valuable time of the IT department to maintain and support the platform. Instead it can operate without the worries of system problems clogging business operations. The responsibility is shifted off the organization onto the hosting company, making for one less worry. Central Desktop allows an organization to put their energy and time into fulfilling their business needs.

All in all the trip to Pasadena was a great experience. The team at Central Desktop was accommodating and extremely helpful. I left with clear understanding of the platform, and the goals of the company both short term and long term. Most importantly, I took away a valuable understanding of how SaaS solutions can provide a practical and efficient alternative particularly within the collaboration software space.