Here’s a report by 451 Research Commissioned by Smartsheet. I believe it sounds like a recap of the back and forth on this board. Highlights strengths and vision and challenges and competitors.
https://www.smartsheet.com/sites/default/files/451_Reprint_S…
Ultimately it wants to support an endless range of purpose-built applications leveraging its feature, template, accelerator and solution flexibility. To get there it focuses on five key product areas – improving its scaling and performance, supporting more complex solutions its customers are building, enhancing engagement and collaboration by its users, improving its dashboard capabilities, and layering in new workflow and automation capabilities.
This is a difficult strategy for competitors to emulate or attack in other ways. Smartsheet is leveraging existing archetypes that everyone knows – spreadsheets, Kanban cards, Gantt charts, task lists, forms, dashboards and reports. Around those archetypes the company is layering on the kinds of capabilities that either make what users can do in those base formats more fully functional or that uses those underlying formats as the basis for net new custom applications. In the process, it’s creating new net archetypes for how to structure and think about work.
Smartsheet’s Dynamic View capability is an example. By allowing highly customized views into a spreadsheet based on permissions and context, the result is not so much just a spreadsheet, a report or a dashboard. Integrate workflow, automation and collaboration into that, along with connectivity with other format types and into other business systems, and you have something for which there isn’t really a comparison – a flexible and customizable canvas. It’s the basis for something that could be simple, or, especially in the context of investments Smartsheet’s making in its workflow engine, visual designer and overall scalability, a much more complex business application…
…In its fourth quarter, more than 700 customers purchased products such as its Control Center, Accelerators and Dynamic View. Over this next year, Smartsheet plans to expand its lineup of packaged solutions
to include corporate governance, marketing and construction. To that end, the company acquired TernPro in January, the maker of Slope, giving it content lifecycle capabilities to bring into its core application experience and to enable new solutions for creative teams. At the start of May, it also acquired resource management SaaS vendor 10000ft, which gives it another piece to support an offering for marketers and creative teams as well as the basis for a PPM product to sell to PMOs
I’m beginning to see the base Smartsheet platform as an enterprise application engine from which a seemingly unlimited number of solutions can be built and delivered in a turn key package. This is getting interesting.
An accompanying analysis of the 10000ft acquisition. A very prudent addition to Smartsheets capabilities.
https://www.smartsheet.com/sites/default/files/451_Analysis_…
Darth