News

Acunote Releases Analytics Tool

• By John K. Waters
• July 17, 2012

Agile toolmaker Acunote has expanded the capability of its namesake project management software to include a new analytics tool aimed at untangling one of the knottier challenges facing companies engaged in multiple Agile development projects: figuring out how, when, and where resources should be allocated.

"Many companies fail to capture and analyze quality data to help them uncover faster, easier, and more accurate ways to manage and predict how and when complex projects will be completed across one or more teams," said Acunote CEO Gleb Arshinov, in a blog post. "The end results are inefficient (and often unhappy) teams, higher costs and, in many cases, competitive disadvantages."

The new Acunote Management Analytics solution is designed to capture and analyze execution data automatically in real-time, and to use those data to create burndown charts that predict and track the progress of both individual team members and entire projects. The result is a big-picture view across projects within an organization. As the company puts it, "Individual team members, project managers, and executives alike can quickly see which tasks need to be completed by whom and by what date, even if plans change during a project."

The Foster City, Calif.-based Acunote (the D.B.A. of Pluron, Inc.) is a Y Combinator-funded Web startup providing online project management and Scrum software. The Web startup provides its online project management and collaboration software to such a range of customers, including among others IBM, Fujitsu, Citrix, VMware, Bank of America, Peugeot and the Federal Communications Commission.

The company's solutions target Agile development projects, but it bills its Web-based analytics offering as a "new breed of business software" aimed at increasing overall productivity.

"We remove the guesswork out of tracking project progress and predicting when it will be finished," said Arshinov said. "We capture and analyze the right user data to help create more productive teams, better managers, and successful companies.  We empower customers to make smart decisions based on user data, not politics. We call such data insights ‘Management Intelligence,' our new breed of business software." 

A 30-day trial version of the Enterprise, Corporate, and Business editions of the product are available for download.