Factories had measured every hour of work for generations. Offices mostly had not. Consulting firms, IT departments and service businesses ran on people's time, and most tracked it in spreadsheets. Niku sold one system to plan, staff and bill those projects. When it filed to go public in early 2000, enterprise software was booming. A single system for knowledge work sounded like the next big software category.

A Second Act After Diba

Farzad Dibachi co-founded Niku in 1998, after selling his earlier company, Diba, to Sun Microsystems. He bet that service firms needed their own version of the planning systems manufacturers already used. If a firm could see every project, every person and every hour in one place, it could price work better. It could staff jobs faster. It could stop losing money on work it had already won.

Smaller, Then Sold to CA

Niku priced at $24 a share in February 2000 and traded far higher in its first months. The crash that followed hit the company hard. It spent several years cutting costs and narrowing its focus to IT governance and project portfolio software. The narrower product found steady buyers. In 2005 Computer Associates agreed to buy Niku for $21 a share in cash, about $350 million.

Cover: Savoy Scaffolding, James McNeill Whistler. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for scaffolding around a building (projects under construction).