New HQ, Hiring For Troy's iDashboards

TROY (WWJ) -- Software from iDashboards turns reams and reams of raw data into useful information that can be analyzed in an instant.

The company has just moved into a floor and a half of space at 900 Tower Drive in Troy, about 22,000 square feet. The company is now up to 67 employees and has six job openings right now in sales, marketing and professional services.

Sometimes it seems it's all a little too much for founder and CEO Shadan Malik to believe.

"Five years ago, we were 12 people in a dingy little corner of an office," Malik said. "Now, we are going through an exciting phase. Business is good -- it could be better, but we are still growing at double-digit rates and getting a lot of traction in areas like higher education and logistics and health care. And when I look and see where this company will be in five years... certainly we'll have a few more floors, and I'm expecting revenue four or five times where it is now."

Malik said customers keep demanding more out of his dashboard software, and they also keep finding novel ways to use it. One higher education client says it's saving more than $1 million since adopting the software by tracking sections of classes that students drop and which get too small to make financial sense -- sections that should be merged with other sections.

Other higher education institutions are using the software to track everything from alumni fundraising to student body demographics to employment after graduation to energy efficiency and power consumption.

Malik said the company is also giving out free copies of its software to colleges and universities to teach the concept of dashboarding to their business and computer science students.

Malik said iDashboards continues to compete with a few niche competitors and the big ERP business management companies that he said "throw in the dashboard. But our core competency is in our very name. We are the pioneer of the dashboard."

New versions of the software also feature sophisticated graphics that can be used to display new hires, sales competitions and other key marketing metrics.

"We call it the display solution, and we launched it earlier this year."

The company is also selling its dashboard as a hosted cloud offering, with packages starting at $199 a month. It's one of the fastest growing parts of the company, with the cloud sales staff expanding from three to 12 within two years.

And what company would be complete without a mascot? For iDashboards, it's a friendly one-eyed robot named Oskar. Check him out at oskar.idashboards.com.

"The world keeps changing, so needs keep changing," Malik said. "The drive for perfection never ends... We've got some really ambitious plans to make this company a pride of Michigan and metro Detroit."