Kantata is a company that develops purpose-built software to provide clarity, control, and confidence to professional services organizations. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Kantata Brand Evangelist Charles Gustine to learn more about the company.
Formation Of Kantata
How did the idea for the company come together? Gustine said:
“While the professional services industry is one of the largest and fastest growing in the world, the lack of purpose-built software tailored to the unique needs of the industry has prevented many organizations from reaching their full business potential. As a result, today’s professional services companies operate without clear visibility into day-to-day operations, using cobbled-together business, project, and resource management tools ill-equipped for the shifting realities of modern services engagements. Kantata recognized that to succeed, professional services organizations (PSOs) and embedded services organizations (ESOs) must transform the way they work – ensuring they can optimize their talent networks and consistently deliver outstanding outcomes for their clients.”
“In 2021, Mavenlink and Kimble Applications announced the launch of Kantata, formed through the successful merger and integration of the two companies. The merger created the market-leading purpose-built Professional Services Cloud that helps professional services organizations transform the way they work.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Gustine explained:
“The Kantata Professional Services Cloud provides transformational capabilities supported by deep industry expertise and is comprised of two industry-leading solutions:
- Kantata SX: Salesforce-native, offering organizations category-leading capabilities while connecting account data from sales to delivery. It is embedded in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Revenue Cloud and seamlessly integrates with Mulesoft and third-party tools to fully support an organization’s delivery model and continued growth.
- Kantata OX: Provides resource-driven organizations the flexibility to adopt new tools, build processes, and reinforce existing best practices when scaling their business. Interoperability enables orgs to easily integrate data sources and drive more value out of mission-critical solutions already supporting their growth.
The Kantata Cloud is a powerful collection of operational management, resource optimization, business intelligence, integration and workflow automation functionality that enables professional services (PS) organizations to overcome persistent operational, client, and financial constraints. Kantata has developed novel capabilities to address critical PS needs in the areas of project portfolio staffing, managed access to external talent networks, and long-term scenario planning to align supply and demand.
Kantata offers purpose-built solutions for professional services organizations. The company’s vertical SaaS-based platform gives organizations the tools they need to build a stable bench of full-time employees and independent contractors to allocate to both existing projects and in anticipation of incoming client or project work.
This reduces the new business development lifecycle, improves client outcomes, and reduces churn in today’s networked economy. Put simply, everything Kantata does is laser-focused on the unique needs of PSOs, making the Kantata Professional Services Cloud the clear market leader.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have you faced in building the company, and has the current macroeconomic climate affected your company? Gustine acknowledged:
“Merging two companies can often create challenges, but the recent merger of Mavenlink and Kimble, which formed Kantata, created significant opportunity. Uniting the two market leaders, which offered unique and complementary capabilities, enabled us to accelerate our efforts to build the best cloud-based solutions for professional services organizations. We are now one organization with a portfolio of category-leading products that provide people-powered businesses the clarity, control, and confidence they need to meet their clients’ high expectations and accelerate their own growth.”
“We have broken new ground for our industry by creating a global company with a unique purpose-built vertical platform that serves the needs of professional services organizations of all sizes and specialties. By providing technology specifically designed to address the unique needs of service organizations, Kantata enables exponentially more effective operations and scaling. The Kantata Professional Services Cloud provides clients:
— Platform-enabled resource optimization capabilities
— Unified data model that puts people at the center
— Applied industry-specific domain expertise
— Streamlined integrations, workflows, and automation
— Built-in talent network frameworks”
Evolution Of Kantata’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Gustine noted:
“As a result of the Mavenlink and Kimble Applications merger, Kantata’s focus on purpose-built technology for professional services and embedded services continues to surge the company forward in 2023. With bringing these two companies and tools together, the creation of the Kantata Professional Services Cloud has shown itself to be successful. The company’s innovative solutions have garnered the attention of new customers across various industries, solidifying its reputation as a transformative force in the professional services landscape.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Gustine cited:
“Kantata saw increasing demand for the Kantata Professional Services Cloud in 2022 and, within its first year, secured over 150 client wins, including Deloitte Central Europe, myDigital Office, Realtime Media, OC&C Strategy Consultants, and Talan, joining the ranks of existing brands like Salesforce, Esri, Huge, Sage, and Hitachi. Kantata established Innovation Councils for both Kantata OX and Salesforce-native Kantata SX that bring together Kantata’s product development teams with client representatives to collaborate on the development of new features and functionalities. For example, Kantata recently rolled out several new features for Kantata OX, including cross-project scheduling, simplified insights reporting that help provide full visibility over the entire business, and tight integration with Slack to enable teams to see up-to-the-minute information and receive notifications for project posts, task, and time and expense submissions.”
“Kantata also expanded its robust global partner network. The company was accepted onto the Salesforce Early Release Validation pilot program, giving its product teams the opportunity to participate with Salesforce in production release candidate testing and early testing access. Kantata also announced it partnered with Sage to create the leading professional services automation and financial management platform purpose-built for PSOs and ESOs. Lastly, Kantata ranked as the Top Provider of PS Solutions in SPI’s 2023 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark. In its first year, Kantata significantly outpaced all other providers with 30% of participants using Kantata as their preferred solution. Additionally, Kantata customers comprise the majority of companies SPI categorizes as ‘High-Performance Professional Services Organizations (HPPs).”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Gustine about customer success stories, he cited:
“By embracing Kantata’s offerings, our customers can amplify productivity, optimize resource allocation, and enhance forecasting accuracy. Such capabilities drive the core of business success, fostering growth, efficient financials, content clients, and thriving team members.
“Esri, a global market leader in geographic information systems software, uses Kantata SX, Kantata’s Salesforce native solution, as their one source of truth for engagement and resourcing data. Kevin Ochs, Professional Services Business Management Director at Esri states, ‘The real game changer of Kantata is the windshield view of our plans. Any accounting system will tell you where you’ve been, but Kantata gives us an accurate, up-to-date, living and breathing plan. Kantata shows us our future demand — if we expect to be short or over-staffed, we can turn some dials to hire and proactively make decisions that will influence the future.’”
“Another customer, Hakkoda, selected Kantata OX, Kantata’s open infrastructure solution. ‘The thing that I fell in love with the most was the resource planning functionality,’ said Corey Ariss, VP of Operations & Technology, Hakkoda. ‘Being able to visually see where people were staffed, what percentage are staffed, and where we can actually allocate them further, that was the primary driver for choosing Kantata. I wish I would have moved to Kantata sooner. There were a lot of blind spots previously, and Kantata gives you the tools and the data you need to be able to run your business.’”
“Since adopting Kantata, Hakkoda has been able to:
- Triple their forecasting horizon — before Kantata, they could only plan four weeks in advance, and today, they are confidently looking 3 to 6 months into the future.
- Improve project margins by 10% by streamlining daily operations, removing blind spots, cutting unnecessary costs, and empowering the team to make data-driven decisions that truly drive the success of the business.
- Plan, allocate, and schedule resources more strategically, proactively, and effectively, which has resulted in reduced bench time between projects and nearly 5% improvement in resource utilization rates.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Gustine assessed:
“The size of the professional services industry is estimated at $8 billion. Kantata is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of professional services firms of all sizes across all industries. Today, our purpose-built cloud software is helping over 2,000 professional services organizations in more than 100 countries focus on and optimize their most important asset: their people.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Gustine affirmed:
“Horizontal cloud applications can help streamline business processes, facilitate collaboration, and improve productivity, but they cannot meet the unique, complex needs of workforces across different industries that have specialized needs. Kantata offers the leading solution purpose-built for professional services organizations. Kantata helps professional services industry leaders break free from generic functionality and the irrelevant features of broad-reaching, outdated PSA alternatives – providing a breadth of products wide enough to scale the entire spectrum of customer requirements and solutions that address the unique needs of professional services organizations. With a laser focus on the innovation and outcomes-oriented approaches of the professional services sector, the Kantata vertical SaaS solution leverages purpose-built technology to help people-powered businesses accelerate growth and reduce churn across a workforce of full-time employees and independent contractors.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Gustine concluded:
“Kantata’s future company goal is to continue transforming the way professional services businesses work. It is important to us that underserved professional services leaders are continuing to ask ‘Where’s my Kantata?’ Services businesses have historically been focused on operational metrics. Kantata wants to excite the narrative around the PSO space while building up a more compelling value proposition. We want businesses to understand how Kantata can and will improve how their businesses work, leading to better employee and client engagement, which ultimately leads to better outcomes for our customers and their clients.”
