Work management and knowledge platforms

Planning the work together, and finding what the company already knows

Back to the pharma company in Hyderabad from Market Segments 16.1 and 16.2. It is launching a new medicine next spring. Forty people across five departments need one plan: who does what, by when. The launch team writes its decisions on a shared page. And six months later, a new manager asks a simple question: what did we decide about the packaging?

This is the last Market Segment of Domain IV, Enterprise SaaS and software. It covers the software that every employee uses, but no single department owns:

the plan of who is doing what, by when
the shared page where the team writes things down
the search that finds what was written

The plan of who does what by when is the first sub-segment, Planning the work; the shared page and the search that finds it are the second, The shared knowledge.

The buyers are companies of every size, often team by team. The largest products in this market are not here. Microsoft, with Office and Teams, and Google, with Workspace, are covered elsewhere. (More on them in Microsoft and Google, in the big-tech collection.) Several of the best-known independent companies are not covered in this Market Segment either. So this Market Segment is smaller than the market it describes.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

This Market Segment has two sub-segments:

Planning the work: project and portfolio management, for teams and for whole companies.

The shared knowledge: the documents, the wiki, and the AI search across all of them.

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Planning the work
The shared knowledge

Planning the work

Work management, project and portfolio management, professional services planning

Back to the medicine launch from the start of this Market Segment. Forty people, five departments, one deadline. Tracking each team's tasks, dates and approvals in one shared plan is called work management, or project management. Deciding which projects a company should fund at all, and tracking them against its strategy, is called portfolio management.

Portfolio management decides which projects a company funds and tracks them against its strategy; work management tracks each team's tasks, dates and approvals in one shared plan.

Smartsheet

with engineers in Bengaluru, has the most job postings of any company covered mainly in this Market Segment. It sells work management built on the grid of a spreadsheet: project plans, timelines, dashboards and approvals for the teams of large companies. Its users are people who would otherwise run their projects in Excel.

Planview

with engineers in Bengaluru, sells the level above: portfolio management, with which a large company decides which projects to fund and tracks them against its strategy.

Celoxis

a Pune company, and NimbleWork, with engineers in Bengaluru, are India's own project-management products. They sell to project-driven companies around the world.

Result

a two-person start-up in Bengaluru, presents itself as work-management software.

The shared knowledge

Connected workspaces and wikis, enterprise search, work AI assistants, business email

Back to the new manager's question from the start of this Market Segment. The answer is written down somewhere: in a meeting note, a document or a chat thread. The companies in this sub-segment keep that knowledge and help people find it. A wiki is a set of pages that anyone on the team can write and edit. Enterprise search is a search box across all of a company's applications.

Enterprise search covers the meeting notes, documents and chat threads in every application, shows each person only what they are allowed to see, and an AI assistant answers from all of it.

Notion

with engineers in Hyderabad, its centre in India, is the connected workspace: documents, the wiki, databases and project boards in one tool. Teams adopt it one by one, and then whole companies do. It now has an AI that writes, and answers questions from the company's own pages.

Glean

with engineers in Bengaluru, sells the search the workplace never had. One search box covers every application the company uses. It respects who is allowed to see what. And an AI assistant answers questions from all of it.

DevRev

was founded by a co-founder of Nutanix, and has engineers in Bengaluru and Chennai. It sells an AI platform that joins the company's tickets, code and documents into one knowledge graph: a map of how all the company's information connects. (Its support product also appears in Market Segment 15.4, Help desk and customer success software, in Industry Vertical 15, Customer service and CX.)

Titan

with engineers in Bengaluru, presents itself as collaboration and business-communications software.

DevRev joins the company's tickets, code and documents into one knowledge graph.

One company covered mainly in another Market Segment belongs here too:

Whatfix

one of Bengaluru's best-known software companies, is here for its guides inside applications. They teach employees each new tool the company rolls out. (More on it in Market Segment 12.8, Corporate learning (LMS) and skills platforms, in Industry Vertical 12, HR tech.)

The answer rather than the document.

A workplace's knowledge used to sit in documents that nobody could find. AI search now reads all of them, and answers the question instead. Glean and Notion are built around that change. Every collaboration product here, and Microsoft's and Google's too, is racing to become the place where the employee asks.

So the medicine launch from the start of this Market Segment runs on two kinds of shared software. A plan shows forty people who does what, by when. And six months later, AI search answers the new manager's question about the packaging, from pages the launch team wrote.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What IT management and workplace tools companies hire for.

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