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Impact
Report
GatherSpace.com seeks
niche in hosted requirements management
Analyst: Dennis
Callaghan
Sector: Enterprise
Software »»
Date: 5 Jan 2007
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Every now and then, we profile a
very early-stage company that's bringing a new business
model to an existing market or carving out its own
niche, but is still a ways from raising venture money
and doesn't even look like an actual company yet.
GatherSpace.com is one such startup. For about
the past year and a half, the company has offered a
hosted requirements
management
application service, which handles the preplanning
stages of project management.
It has a handful of customers and just one full-time
employee. Despite a fresh approach and low price point,
GatherSpace.com will face a lot of hurdles in proving
its business model, getting funding and gaining the
customer volume it needs to sustain itself.
| The
message |
| GatherSpace.com
is trying to disrupt the requirements management
software space with a low-cost hosted application
service, and is expecting to grow significantly in
2007. |
| Competitive
landscape |
| Rally
and its own Rallydev.com hosted service is the
chief competitive target for GatherSpace.com.
Telelogic, IBM, Compuware and Serena are the
licensed heavyweights in the space. Plenty of
other smaller challengers abound, including
Artifact, which gives away requirements management
for free in its hosted software development
management service. |
| The
451 Assessment |
| We
like a lot about GatherSpace.com: low price point,
low overhead, new, but not unique delivery model.
That said, we've yet to see the company's business
take off much in the first year and a half of its
existence, and we're skeptical it will meet the
ambitious growth targets it's set, in a space rife
with both commercial competitors and
do-it-yourself alternatives. Still, if
GatherSpace.com can gain a bit more customer
traction, attract funding and start to take on
more of the trappings of a growing startup, it
could make some waves in its space. We're
intrigued by the possibilities of a company like
this joining with a hosted project management
vendor. |
GatherSpace.com was founded early
in 2005 by Darren Levy and Hassan Elletrache, both
business analysts who had worked on a number of
application development projects at large companies like
Chase Manhattan Bank, Warner Brothers, and
Sony Pictures, and saw the need for a low-cost,
user-friendly requirements
management
tool to use in the early stages of such projects. In
June 2005, GatherSpace.com launched its hosted requirements
management
application service, and has since signed up 25 paying
customers.
Levy is the company's sole
full-time employee, though it does employ seven others
on a contract basis. Elletrache still consults for the
company. GatherSpace.com was literally conceived in
Levy's garage, and is now run from his home office in
Westwood, California. The company has yet to receive any
outside funding, though is considering it down the road,
possibly as early as the middle of next year.
GatherSpace.com's namesake service
is essentially a hosted collaboration tool for both
business and technical teams to use when gathering and
managing the changing requirements
of a software development project. Requirements
often shift as business needs change. GatherSpace.com is
used to define, document, communicate, test and manage
those requirements
throughout the application lifecycle, so that the
application meets business specifications and is
delivered on time and within budget.
The service comes in Standard and
Enterprise editions. Standard Edition is good for up to
100 projects and 250MB of disk space and three
customizations, and is priced at $9.95 per user per
month. Enterprise Edition is $12.95 per user per month
for an unlimited number of projects, up to 1GB of disk
space and five customizations. Unlike most hosted
application services, GatherSpace.com does not charge
setup fees.
GatherSpace.com has 25 customers to
date and targets smaller companies that can't easily
afford large upfront software license fees. It has
signed up some larger public sector customers as well,
namely the US Department of Transportation and
the Georgia Farm Bureau. Anystream and
Threespot are reference customers as well.
The company plans to expand its
business significantly in 2007, growing 'organically' to
about 200 paying customers. IT project managers are the
service's main target within those organizations, anyone
who needs to set the requirements
to build a new software application or website or
architect systems. The company believes its service
could conceivably be used for any project with a lot of
features and specifications – even a home kitchen
remodeling project.
GatherSpace.com sees its most
direct competitor as Rally Software Development's
Rally product, which is available as on-premise software
or hosted at the company's website. Pricing for the
hosted version ranges from $19 per user per month for
Rally Team, the single project team version, up to $85
per user per month for Rally Enterprise, which supports
multiple teams working together and includes premium
support.
Other licensed software products
that GatherSpace.com believes it would be a low-cost
replacement for include Telelogic DOORS,
IBM Rational's RequisitePro and Compuware
Optimal Trace, which Compuware got when it bought
SteelTrace earlier this year. Scope IT
offers a hosted project planning service, which we think
has some crossover with GatherSpace.com. The company is
exploring integration points with hosted project management
service provider eProject.
Accept Software's Accept
360° is a requirements
management
tool specific to product planning and design.
Artifact Network gives away the Requirements
Management
piece of its Lighthouse software development management
hosted service for free, with the idea that customers
will pay for other modules. Serena Software's
Dimensions RM, Ravenflow's Raven,
FeaturePlan, iRise Manager and Sparx
Systems' Enterprise Architect are other licensed
requirements
management
offerings.
| Strengths |
Weaknesses |
| GatherSpace.com has low overhead, a
modern interface and delivery model and can
undercut most of its competitors on price. |
The
company remains at a very nascent stage with only
one full-time employee, limited working capital
and no discernible way to drive significant
growth, which it will need since its low price
point will require heavy customer volume. |
| Opportunities |
Threats |
| At its
price point and hosted delivery model,
GatherSpace.com could be an attractive proposition
for a lot of companies if word gets out about
it. |
A
number of larger vendors like IBM, Compuware,
Telelogic and Serena already play in this space,
which is surprisingly competitive. Other hosted
services already exist in the space, including
Artifact's Lighthouse, which gives its
requirements management module away for
free. |
|
