Highlights

• Pervasive’s small footprint was easily embedded
• Planview OpenSuite connector built with Pervasive technology in less than a week
• Common platform for all integrations
• Pre-built connectivity to enterprise applications
• Out-of-the-box packaged integrations to key applications
• Powerful live cloud-based integration demo environment

Benefits

Common integration platform
With Pervasive technology, Planview can build all integrations on a common platform across the globe, train all technical resources on one platform and deliver a consistent message to prospects and customers.

Out-of-the-box packaged integrations
Planview now offers customers out-of-the box connectivity to more than 200 enterprise applications including SAP and Oracle. In addition, pre-packaged integrations to Siemens Teamcenter PLM, JIRA, BMC products and Microsoft products are available now, and more are being built.

Strong POC capabilities
The Pervasive demo environment enables Planview to powerfully demonstrate the ability to integrate, and to integrate quickly.

Competitive advantage
The ability to provide customers with seamless connectivity between Planview products and a wide variety of applications helps Planview to win business and compete with larger IT and software companies.

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Capturing a Powerful Competitive Advantage with Pervasive

With offices across the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific, Planview® supports customers worldwide in virtually every industry with solutions for IT Portfolio Management, Product Development, and Corporate Performance. An independent vendor in a highly competitive market, Planview wanted to provide its customers with the unique ability to easily integrate its flagship portfolio management solution, Planview Enterprise®, with existing technology investments. The company felt an integration software solution that could be seamlessly embedded in Planview products, which would provide flexible and out of- the-box connectivity, would give their customers what they needed while honing Planview’s competitive edge. Planview also sought an active technology partner, one the company could work with hand-in-hand to pursue sales opportunities and support its strategic business plans. Planview chose Pervasive.

By embedding Pervasive Data Integrator™ into its OpenSuite platform, Planview gained the ability to provide customers with seamless connectivity between Planview Enterprise and other enterprise applications and gained an integration platform on which all Planview integrations could be standardized. Leveraging Pervasive integration expertise, Planview has gained a powerful competitive advantage. In addition, through the Pervasive Skytap environment, Planview can show live demos of integration from anywhere, such as bidirectional connectivity to SAP and Oracle, an advantage that helps Planview close a lot of deals.

Standardize Integration Platform with Embedded Solution

Recognized as a leader in the project and portfolio management (PPM) software space by both Gartner and Forrester Research, Planview knows the importance of making wise IT investments to support business goals. When Louise Allen, Vice President of Product Management, first came to Planview, she recognized an increasing concern. She said, “We had to find a way to standardize our integrations, because I could see this ball coming…how important integration was going to become to our business.”

To keep up with the growing volume of prospects and customers with various integration needs, it was important for Planview to develop a standard integration platform. “We had to have a common connector that we could count on,” said Allen, “One that we could continue to maintain and move forward, and that was a commonality across everything that we do.” With a standardized platform, Planview could offer a consistent message to customers and would have a single platform to train personnel worldwide to use.

Additionally, Planview needed a partner with the QA infrastructure necessary to thoroughly test connectors. Finally, to support presales, Planview also needed the ability to convincingly demonstrate to customers the integration capabilities that would specifically address their particular integration needs.

Through its partnership with Pervasive, Planview was able to address all of these challenges.

Finding the Right Relationship to Integrate with Everything 

Planview didn’t want to focus its resources on building integrations, so instead sought to find a technology provider who could not only provide the integration expertise, but could become a strategic partner with Planview in pursuing sales opportunities. Planview wanted to gain the comprehensive integration capability that could give the company an edge in a highly competitive marketplace. “We feel that our independence gives us a leg up in the market – and this is underscored by our ability to integrate with everything. That’s what makes this relationship so important to us. It was essential that we pick the right integration partner,” said Allen.

To find the right technology partner, Planview spent between three and four months doing a deep technology review of Pervasive and other integration vendors, including Cast Iron and Boomi. “It was a nontrivial exercise for us,” said Allen. “You want no surprises when you pick a vendor.” The evaluation ultimately came down to a decision between Cast Iron and Pervasive. Allen said that in the end, Cast Iron “just couldn’t stand up to Pervasive; it was not going to go where we needed it to go.” Allen added that Planview “definitely chose Pervasive because of the technical aspects, but there was also a big relationship aspect as well.”

Pervasive Provides Seamlessly Embedded Integration and Broad Connectivity

To address the need for a standard integration platform, Planview decided to OEM Pervasive technology. Pervasive provided a software engineer to work on-site at Planview, an arrangement that Allen said has proved “outrageously successful” in developing the Planview OpenSuite platform as well as specific customer integrations. “The rate that we’ve been able to crank out productized integrations has been amazing, a lot more than we would have been able to do if we built this whole strategy ourselves,” said Allen. Having that expertise in house also enabled Planview to change priorities on the fly and easily keep up with such things as upgrades and new APIs.

To make use of the extensive Pervasive integration platform, Planview needed a connector from Pervasive Data Integrator to Planview products, a project that Allen said, “literally took less than a week. It was so seamless, it was almost like ‘something’s wrong here,’ because it was just so easy.” An added benefit to Planview was the ability to rigorously test the connector through Pervasive’s strong QA infrastructure.

The embedded Planview connector provided Planview with a common integration platform on which all their technical resources worldwide are trained. “That has allowed us globally to have a consistent platform and a consistent message to our customer base and our prospects, instead of building one-off integrations here and there and trying to support that,” said Allen. She estimated that about 75% of Planview’s customer base now has some version of their integration platform. Allen added, “The ability to say that we have prebuilt connectivity out of the box is a huge advantage for us.”

Gaining the Advantage by Demonstrating Integration Expertise

Planview has also built end-to-end productized integrations to such leading applications as Siemens® Teamcenter® PLM, JIRA® and BMC® products on the service desk side. Planview can now offer productized integrations that customers can buy out of the box, or customers can buy the integration platform and build the integrations themselves, or they can have Planview build the integrations. “But every one of our integrations worldwide is built on the Pervasive platform,” Allen said.

Demonstrating integration expertise has become an important part of Planview’s pre-sales process, and another area where the partnership with Pervasive has proved invaluable. “We just don’t do a deal without being able to show that expertise... and we close the majority of those deals that we touch,” said Allen. “The support that we receive from Pervasive going in hand-in-hand in these opportunities has been amazing.” Pervasive’s Skytap demo environment gives Planview the capability to show a live demo of bi-directional integration between Planview and such enterprise applications as the Oracle and SAP suites, which Allen points to as a huge advantage, especially over competitors using slideware. Allen adds, “That’s why we win deals right there.”

Planview uses Pervasive technology for integration to front and back-office applications, for integration to other Planview product lines and ESBs, as well as to provide Microsoft® Excel® import/ export capabilities.

Moving Forward - Cloud Technology & More

Planview will continue to expand its offering of productized integrations and is looking at a number of different products to add. Moving forward with the partnership, Planview is looking at taking advantage of the cloud technology, and enhanced message queuing capabilities coming in Pervasive Data Integrator v10.

“We’re in the second year of this strategic relationship that we have with Pervasive, and it’s going to continue,” said Allen. “It’s just key to our business, and we’ve been very, very happy with the success.”