Central Desktop
Collaboration Software that Goes Beyond Online Project Management

Founded in 2005 by Isaac Garcia and Arnulf Hsu, Central Desktop provides collaboration software solutions that connect people with information and enable business teams to interact, share and manage everyday activities from anywhere, anytime. The company delivers a pure SaaS social technology platform that integrates next-generation business teams more efficiently. Scalable for businesses of all sizes, Central Desktop’s comprehensive suite of online collaboration tools incorporate features like document sharing, task management, web conferencing, and databases.

Central Desktop’s products are built to tackle the emerging trends on how companies will adopt collaboration software in the future. According to a forecast by the Gartner group, by 2017, CMOs are likely to have more control on the IT budget than the CIOs—a trend that the C-suite will have to come in terms with. “If the marketing department wants to buy a platform or product, the CMO can make the decision; but with security being the main concern, CIO or the IT department will end up approving it,” says Isaac Garcia, Founder and General Manager, Central Desktop. He believes that this trend will favor Central Desktop, as the company’s solutions are built to comply with stringent security requirements. “Many companies have high security and configuration requirements,” notes Garcia. To address this, Central Desktop has added an enterprise security layer. Central Desktop integrates with single sign-on and active directory which allows stronger, more complex passwords inside large organizations. In addition, they have advanced capabilities, such as dynamic databases and a robust workflow automation engine that enables customers to configure applications to create a very specific workflow and deal with manual error-prone processes.

“Clients like solutions that are adaptable to different environments, and our platform is versatile with a rich feature set that enables collaboration in any situation,” notes Garcia. This makes Central Desktop a de-facto solution provider for companies of all sizes. The company also addresses the emerging trend of BYOD by ensuring that their platform is adaptable and compatible with all devices as per users’ need.

Central Desktop’s solutions are utilized by many big players in the industry including American Red Cross, CareerBuilder, CBS, and Javelin. For instance, the Major League Baseball Advanced Media (ML-BAM) group needed a sturdy collaborative and project management system to manage every video highlight clip that is published on the web. Central Desktop provided them an automated project management and workflow system. The clip went through a very distinct set of tasks, triggers, and notifications as it advanced along the process of being identified, edited, reviewed, approved, and published. The net result of deploying this solution was massive reduction of time, money, and resources needed to publish the clips on web. The entire process that earlier took about 45 minutes was performed in less than 5 minutes with Central Desktop.

Going forward, the company plans to strengthen its presence in markets including Europe and Asia where they see a heavy demand. As for their technology advances, Central Desktop hopes to improve mobile access to their platform that will help build rich and robust project management solutions that cater to the overall mobile experience. The company continues to be intrigued about integrating synchronous and asynchronous technologies. “Right now project management and collaboration solutions tend to be very asynchronous, it’s not happening in real-time. We see more and more integrations with features like web meetings, real-time chat, and video opportunities,” concludes Garcia.