DeskAway is a sleek looking web based project management SaaS from a Mumbai based company called Synage. You can set up client projects, set milestones, reminders, email – contact management, view progress reports on projects, assign tasks to team members and most importantly, have a centralized repository for all your ongoing projects. This way, your entire team is up to date about the progress of all projects – reducing clutter and increasing efficiency.
DeskAway has been very well designed and was surprisingly very fast when I took a test drive. Within no time, I was able to create a project, set tasks, add team members etc. I was pretty impressed with the service, however knowing that this is a crowded space, I asked Sahil, the founder some questions about the competition:
Q ) What market are you trying to address – Indian or international ?
International ofcourse since its online. Why limit to India. The adoption of Indian companies to saas products will be slower as people are used to on-premise software, installations, someone coming for a demo etc.
Q ) How do you plan to compete with the other players like 37Signals etc. ?
I know a lot of people ( and websites for that matter) that dislike Basecamp as they feel its too simplified and lacks basic features for project management (e.g. reporting, email alerts etc.). What we are going to do is to target the creative industry and create a niche for oursleves. Most of the PM tools on the web are me-too software services. Again, more than 1 company can co-exist on the web – the market is way too big.
Q ) What separates Deskaway from the other project mgt SaaS out there ?
The niche that we are going into. Focus on a target group (web design/dev companies, branding/ creative studios, print
agencies, freelancers etc.) and solve a real need for them in project management.
They recently launched and adoption is steadily increasing. I think their product is pretty impressive – lets see how well they execute in terms of user adoption.
Hi – I read this review, and found it useful. I am not in this target audience, but I am glad to see a good product out of India, which looks stylish and is powerful. I will forward this to people I know for a trial run. Kudos and good luck!
How can this be position against MSFT’s PWA PRoject WEb Access ?? What is the main differentiator ?
You need to configure/install a PWA after you have your data in MS Project so that you can access it online. And you probably have to do it on your server. If you are not technical, then you probably need to get help. On the other hand, DeskAway is an out-of-the-box solution to project management for non-technical people that is affordable and is easier to setup (less than 30 secs) and use.