Pacific Edge Projects Itself

Of course, there's more to Pacific Edge's culture than software. The company has made it a point to recruit industry veterans (with an average age of 34), many of whom have years of experience in the project-management field. Some of them came en masse from outfits such as Seagate and Microsoft's Visio. Some were friends with Pacific Edge's founders (like the company's first employee, Terri Inglis, 38, who has been friends with Hjorten since the eighth grade). But nearly everyone has the same type of personality: They are all sticklers for detail.

"This mentality reflects care and control, just as the product does," says Hjorten, a self-described psychoneatnick. But the culture isn't uptight, she insists. It's careful.

Sometimes, being careful means being slow. Given Hjorten's passion for marketing, she believes that the vice president of marketing position is the most important job in the company. So she took the unusual step of filling that post last, with someone who didn't need to take the job. Thanks to his Microsoft stock options, Jim Dunnigan, 42, a former product manager of marketing for Microsoft Project, knew that he never had to work again. In fact, he left his high-profile Microsoft job in September 1993 to be a teacher and an IT administrator in a school district. Then, at a Microsoft alumni party in December 1999, he met some other veterans who were working at Pacific Edge -- and raving about the company. (The Microsoft campus is just four miles away from Pacific Edge's headquarters.) Intrigued by Pacific Edge's vision to change the concept of what the workplace was all about, he joined the company in January. "If this place were just about selling project-management software, I wouldn't be here," he says.

Not that selling project-management software comes without challenges. The billion-dollar industry is dominated at the low end by Microsoft Project, which claims about $400 million in annual revenues. The high end is carved up among a number of software vendors, such as ABT Corp. (which was recently acquired by Niku Corp.), Artemis Management Systems, and Primavera Systems, that sell expensive applications. (An enterprise-wide sale for Project Office is worth about $50,000, compared with the roughly $300,000 that competing solutions are worth per sale.)

Dunnigan faces the challenge of convincing investors and customers that Pacific Edge is creating an entirely new arena for project-management software -- products that are designed for ease of use and for fast installation, and that are intended to help users collaborate more effectively. "In a world where employees are scarce, you need to have products like this to keep people moving smoothly from one project to the next," says Andrew Goloboy, a senior analyst at IDC, in Framingham, Massachusetts. "But there's a lot of competition from companies that are trying to provide the same features. The real test lies in who Pacific Edge's customers are and in whether the company's product is easy enough for more mainstream companies to use."

Keeping the product usable and on the leading edge is the charge of Colby Africa, 26, another Microsoft alumnus who did not expect to find himself at Pacific Edge. A child prodigy who was programming computers at the age of 8, Africa dropped out of a college astronomy program and made his way to Microsoft. At 21, he was one of the youngest product managers in the company. But he was doing marketing, a far cry from programming, his real passion. Africa wanted to create a product that could work the way that people do. And he didn't want to confine users to a platform like Microsoft Project.

So now he's Pacific Edge's chief software architect. For version 3.0 of Project Office, Africa wrote 30,000 lines of code and created 27 different components. At the same time, he built a team of programmers. "The features we offer in our product depend on how we manage Pacific Edge," he says.

The Customer Connection

It is a cardinal principle of life at Pacific Edge: Figure out how to do more with less. This principle doesn't just determine how the company runs its office or how it writes its code; it also applies to how Pacific Edge sells the product itself. Just because Hjorten is passionate about marketing doesn't mean that she lavishes money on her projects. The company often does a virtual demonstration of its product to customers on the Web. That approach saves time and travel expenses, and it reaches more customers in less time.

Pacific Edge doesn't expect customers to buy everything at once. Because Project Office is designed to integrate with the widely distributed Microsoft Project, and because customers can access the software on the Internet, buyers can dabble at first and then purchase more later. For example, customers can pay for the full-featured Project Office package for one division of their company and then roll the product out across the rest of the company gradually. Pacific Edge reports that within six months, roughly 80% of such customers upgrade to a new version of the product or expand it beyond that initial division.