How it all began... Sahil and Sitanshi Parikh moved back from the U.S. to India in early 2005 with a dream to set up a software product company. Well-versed with design and development, having worked with a wide range of companies in the US, they (as Synage Software) initially took up web design and development projects. With a great desire for transparency and accountability in their organization, they realized a need for a tool to assign tasks to their team and track the number of hours they would take. It was important for them to make delegation easy and to have an organized view of client work. At that time, Sahil was also reading Michael Gerber's E-Myth where the latter spoke about having systems in place so that things can be automated. Continue reading...
The first version of DeskAway was developed in late 2005 (it wasn't called DeskAway then) just for internal use mainly to see what people in the team were working on. Even while travelling (which the founders love doing!) it became easy and efficient to stay in control of what was going on at work. The goal was to simplify the whole process of completing a project from start to finish with the least amount of friction.

With a very positive response to their own system, from other companies that heard about it and clients that had access to it, they realized that there was a demand for a product just like what they had. They began checking out other products, but couldn't find anything that was simple, feature-rich and yet affordable. Virtual teams were becoming popular, software as a service (SaaS) was on the rise and this is when they saw an opportunity for their product to fulfill the need for a simple, powerful yet affordable collaborative online service backed by personalized customer service.

Sahil's book The SaaS Edge has been published in December 2010.

What? DeskAway, is a web-based project collaboration software that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage and track their projects & work.

DeskAway is carefully hand-crafted by a small team of developers and designers. Each feature is custom-made to give you the ease of use and power to help you grow your business.

When? DeskAway was launched in late 2007, in a test beta version. We started the painstaking process of getting feedback from the initial users and building up based on qualitative responses. We revamped some of the features, learned what people liked/dis-liked and stayed in touch with bloggers. When we felt ready to launch the early version, we didn't know how the online community would react! Our first online customer came in on Dec 31st 2008. We partied hard that night. Now, we roll-out updates once a month. We have many people who have been kind in their testimonials, reviews and feedback (see buzz), which makes us smile. See our Journey 2008 and 2009.

Where? Mumbai, India. Sorry, we don't take up outsourcing projects.:-)

Why the name DeskAway? There is nothing better than knowing that your work is going on smoothly when you are away from your desk. Think vacations, traveling, working from home.

Vision To make DeskAway into a world-class online service that provides teams an easy and a powerful way to collaborate and work smarter. Life is short. Stay in control of it.

We would be honored for you to check out what we are working on (who knows, it might just help you improve the way your team works :-)).