Part I of this blog series explained Deltek’s ebullience despite a hostile and depressed environment, and also analyzed the recent developments (and anticipated future developments) at Deltek’s Professional Service line of business, which is largely represented by Deltek Vision [evaluate this product]. Part II then analyzed the recent developments (and anticipated future developments) at Deltek’s Government Contractors (GovCon) line of business, which is represented by Deltek Costpoint [evaluate this product] and Deltek GCS Premier [evaluate this product].

This final part will focus on Deltek’s Enterprise Project Management (EPM) line of business, which helps companies deal with the ever-growing reporting regulations being imposed by government agencies. Read the rest of this entry »

Time and again during my decade or so of covering the enterprise applications market as an industry analyst I have witnessed what difference a year can make. And boy, would 2008 be such a year!

A year ago or so, I concluded an in-depth four-part series on Deltek (NASDAQ: PROJ), whose executives were recently happy to tell me that 2008 was not that terrible a year for the company. Quite the contrary, Deltek feels comfortable as a company even in these troubled economic times. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, a few months after Part I of this blog post was published, which focused on Deltek’s pre-New Mountain Capital private equity investment era, the time has finally come for us to analyze why being again publicly traded should (or should not) work better for Deltek this time. If one is to judge merely by the most recent financial figures, it would appear to be working well, but my focus here is on some lingering “softer” issues too.

So, when the new management team took the helm at Deltek in mid 2005, it realized that many good things had happened over the previous two decades at the company, but that one can never be too complacent. Indeed, room for improvements existed in many regards, or at least  some challenges could always be turned into opportunities. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last decade or so of covering the enterprise applications market, I’ve witnessed so many products and vendors disappearing and reappearing under a different name, ownership, etc., but it is for the first time now, at the end of 2007 that I saw basically the same vendor go public for the second time (and in a 10 year timespan). Namely, Deltek (evaluate its flagship product), the leading provider of enterprise applications software designed specifically for project-focused businesses (those with business processes revolving around the engagement, execution and delivery of projects), has done it again. Its common shares begun trading November 1, 2007 on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the trading symbol “PROJ”. Previously, the company, which was founded in 1983, used to be publicly traded under the symbol “DLTK” from 1997 till late 2002/early 2003, when it was de-listed and went private again (for the time being).

I don’t intend to bore you with the financial figures (about the number of shares offered, its current share value, market capitalization, etc.), since many wire alerts have repeatedly already done so. What is more interesting here is Deltek chief executive officer (CEO), Kevin Parker’s statements that the company — which, as mentioned above, was taken public 10 years ago before being taken private about five years later by the founding deLaski family — launched its second initial public offering (IPO) as a means to boost recognition of the Deltek brand. Parker believes that it is an important time to have a broader audience, and the company is thus focusing on expanding globally. Proceeds from the offering will be used to pay down debt, which Parker said will give the company greater ability to reinvest in the company.

In his recent blog post, Ray Wang of Forrester Research is quite positive and upbeat about the IPO, and fully agrees with Parker’s ideas and justifications. Myself, I often tend to mostly agree with Ray, with the difference that one should always mention some caveats too (and please, can anyone show me a single company without some challenges?). On the other hand, a report that preceded the Deltek IPO by a few months (i.e., it was posted after Deltek’s pre-IPO S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] ) was quite negative, berating the S-1 filing (especially the “Description of business” part) as sounding so outdated (so 1990-ish), and without any references to the contemporary trends like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS)/On-Demand, Web 2.0, etc. Also, the article opines that the heydays of the Professional Service Automation (PSA) market (one in which Deltek competes) are far behind us (I might agree with the fact that the PSA acronym might be a “goner”, but not really the market opportunity – certainly not in a services economy). Read the rest of this entry »