Intelex Talks ‘Empowering’ Customers, 2015 Roadmap at User Conference

LNS Research recently had the opportunity to attend Intelex Technologies’ fifth annual user conference, Ignite Performance 2014, held in downtown Toronto, where the environment, health and safety (EHS) and quality management software vendor showcased recent success and its plans to empower customers through an ambitious product roadmap.

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The event took place only a week after Intelex concluded its most successful fiscal year, where it achieved considerable revenue growth over the previous year and secured the largest single deal in customer history. These financial successes were mirrored by turnout at the event, which, with over 230 delegates represented a 40% increase in overall attendance over 2013’s conference. The conference also showcased the company’s expanded partner network, with representation from Ehnesa, RegScan, SiteHawk, E2 Managetech, and CH2M Hill, an Ignite Performance gold sponsor.

The event featured 18 sessions and 24 product roundtables, all of which seemed to foster robust discussion and a sense of genuine engagement among participants. This sense of collaboration illustrates what has been one of Intelex’s strengths in the space, and part of what separates it from other vendors. From a collaboration perspective, Intelex has arguably been a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to enabling users to share best practices and tactics for using its software and user-configured forms through its collaboration/community portal, Intelex Exchange.

"Empowerment" was an underlying theme throughout the event talks, including President and CEO Mark Jaine’s keynote. In his address, Jaine provided his assessment of Intelex’s capacity to empower users through its software across six criteria: best practices, control, insight, access, social, and experience. What’s interesting to note here is that, where many vendors tend to either focus solely on their successes or insist that they are ‘everything to everyone’ at events like these, Jaine confronted both the company’s strengths and areas for improvement across these criteria.

For example, though he acknowledged the company was strong in terms of empowering clients to leverage best practices and control the software effectively, he conceded that with respect to insight (namely reporting) and social functionality, Intlex had strengths, but also opportunities for improvement. That said, he used the opportunity to discuss plans to address deficiencies. To improve ‘insight’ offered by the software, he announced the rollout of a new Reporting Engineer product that is designed to discover relationships between unrelated data. This will be a welcome addition, for while the Intelex system seems to have a robust backend for reporting and analytics, it has room for improvement in terms of robust reporting and analytics capabilities across the breadth of its offering when stacked against other market leaders in the space.

User Interface ‘Overhaul’ and Product Roadmap

At the event, the company also announced a soon-to-be-released overhaul of the software’s user interface. Saying it was near completion though he was “not quite ready to show it yet,” Jaine explained that in pursuit of its dream to become a truly global leader in EHS and quality software, Intelex was working with new partners to build a world-class UI and was targeting a Q1 2015 release.

At the conference, Intelex also underscored its focus on expanding product capabilities relating to offline functionality, enterprise and operational risk management, information security (there’s an ISO 27000 application under development), and sustainability performance through its recently launched Sustainability Performance Indicator (SPI). Intelex client General Mills provided a comprehensive client keynote presentation on how it had successfully implemented SPI (branding it internally under a different name) to support sustainability reporting processes. Also, a couple of intriguing features oriented around user adoption, user experience and training were demonstrated.

The LNS Research Take

This year’s user conference demonstrated that Intelex seems to be, as one employee put it, “all grown up” and has entered the big leagues, as it were. It is clear between sustained organic growth, an expanded partner network, and significantly increased customer attendance at the event, Intelex remains a financially sound, customer-driven, ambitious vendor that is poised to be a key player on the EHS and quality management software scene in the years ahead.

Intelex’s preference for organic growth and partner collaboration highlighted at the conference is an interesting model. It remains to be seen whether this approach will truly poise the vendor for success as it grows.

Intelex’s focus on usability and user-facilitated configuration through its flexible existing and upcoming tools, as highlighted at the conference, is commendable. However, as LNS Research has seen with different enterprise software vendors across EHS, quality and other spaces, such an approach can also cultivate long-term issues pertaining to implementations and support. It will be interesting to see how Intelex balances the ‘give-the-customer-the-keys’ approach against the other extreme end of the spectrum, one that involves defining the processes and best practices a vendor feels a customer ought to adapt to in order to achieve performance excellence. Neither approach—nor any of the approaches in between—is right or wrong, necessarily. But navigating this divide can be challenging for all vendors.

Intelex customers at the conference seem to genuinely collaborate and came across as engaged with one another and by and large happy with the product and the vision outlined by Jaine, who called attendees his “key stakeholders” and “best developers.” It will be fine balance for Intelex to enable and ‘empower’ customers with the sheer configurability of the tools and the highly ambitious plans for new products and functionality presented at the conference.

As underscored at the conference, Intelex’s ambitions are nothing less than lofty. And in many cases the vendor seems to be well-positioned to eventually become the ‘one-stop-shop’ it wants to be for EHS and quality management. A perennial challenge vendors face when upgrading one version of its platform to a more advanced platform—something Intelex and many of its key competitors in the space have recently experienced—is successfully migrating clients from the old platform to the new version. Intelex is nearly two years deep into the rollout of its most recent platform (V6).

Many clients I chatted with throughout the conference were happy with their migration, while a number of others were wondering when it would be complete. Recent interviews with Intelex have indicated the company is closing in on its completion of upgrades, but given V6 was introduced over two years ago and that the vendor is already looking ahead to a V7 rollout, it is clear the migration period has been challenging at times—again, not an uncommon issue for even the most progressive EHS vendors these days. As with other vendors, Intelex will probably take cues from this migration experience in future releases to ensure a more seamless delivery of new products, features and functionality.

As Ignite Performance made clear, Intelex is shooting for nothing less than the stars, and is building out a sound mid-market strategy to appeal to customers that need something less than the ultimate enterprise solution, while also appealing to larger, global clients with new, bigger offerings. At LNS Research I have seen some EHS and/or quality management vendors pigeonhole themselves into serving either smaller/medium clients, or else focusing solely on global enterprises. So while Intelex cannot be criticized for a lack of ambition, how they walk the tightrope of aspiring to be everything to everyone will be worth watching in the coming months and years. However, as I mentioned earlier, what’s notable is that Intelex can be its own critic, and for the CEO to address his company’s own opportunities for improvement (e.g. insight, reporting) and describe how the company would seek to capitalize on these opportunities is refreshing.