Yardi Systems is like Uncle Sam: It wants you. And it doesn’t want you going anywhere else. Since launching in 1984, the Santa Barbara, Calif.–based provider of multifamily technology services has regularly migrated new applications into Voyager, its Web-based enterprise management system, with the goal of fulfilling every one of its clients’ technological wants and needs via one interface.
“We find that there is tremendous benefit to our clients when they can eliminate the need to transfer data between platforms and avoid redundancy of multiple systems,” says Yardi vice president of marketing Brad Setser, who points to utility billing, payment processing, procure-to-pay, and revenue management as examples of applications that Yardi has brought into the Voyager fold at the behest of its clients. “In those cases in which we acquired a solution, we re-engineered the solution into our core platform so that the need for an interface would be eliminated.”
Yardi’s approach puts the company squarely in the middle of a perpetual debate in multifamily technology, a seemingly endless argument that pits “best-of-breed” and “integrated” solutions against one another in the battle to win IT, operational, and platform dominance.
