About Central
The Story
The story behind the creation of Central starts like most new products. We had a problem to solve. We looked out at the options that existed in the world at the time. None of them fit the criteria we were looking for, so we decided to build it.
Central was born from the IT organization at our parent company Centric Consulting. Centric’s business was growing and changing very quickly. We had outgrown all of the processes and systems that helped us as a startup, so like most companies we started buying up SaaS products to help us continue to scale. We started with purchasing a cloud based ERP, then Recruiting and Onboarding, CRM and Marketing automation, and the next thing we knew we had grown to 10+ different third party SaaS and custom systems we were supporting. That in a nutshell becomes the problem. The data every company depends on to operate and in some cases differentiate becomes fragmented and disconnected across so many places, and the result usually ends up in a backlog of things the business wants to do but can’t. Which leads to the second part of the problem. There are not enough technologists in the world to help support the growing dependence that business has on data.
So why didn’t we just buy a solution? The market for “middleware” or integration products was not void of options, so why build something much less make a company out of it? Well the short answer is we tried to buy something. We looked at Mulesoft and Informatica, which were very established in the Enterprise Space. We also looked at emerging citizen developer/no code products like Zapier and Microsoft Flow (now Power Platform). Our conclusion was the Enterprise products were way too expensive and complex for our needs, and the no code products could not handle the complexity of some of the use cases we had. We wanted something with the capability of the Enterprise products but with the simplicity and total cost of ownership of the citizen developer products, and so that is what we set out to build.
The Solution
The solution to the data management problems listed above is two-fold. First we have to create more software builders. Second we have to make the software builders that exist today more effective. The software solution to both areas is rooted in no/low code platforms. Our belief and the reason we turned our internal project into a whole new company is the existing no code options were not solving the entire process that software developer goes through in building a solution - Design, Build, Testing, Version Control, Deployment, Monitoring, Maintenance. More importantly there was no emphasis on the most important asset to the company - the actual data…..the quality of the data, managing metadata and the relationships within your data, governing your data architecture, to name a few.
The Vision
This is just the starting point for Central. Data management and integration is the foundation, but there are even greater automation opportunities we will pursue. We picked our company name for a reason - TeamCentral. We want to build virtual extensions of your work teams. We envision a world where every information worker receives personalized assistance to help automate things out of their day to day so they can focus on the harder problems and the areas of differentiation for their business. Our solutions will not be designed as a replacement for the jobs humans do today, but more of an augmentation to help workers be even more productive and focused in their jobs.
This Site
What you will see on this site is everything about our product. Guides on how to use our products, release notes, ideas for upcoming products or features, points of view from the product team, etc. This is the area for the product team to discuss and promote the cool things we are building.