Pelle Hjortblad, CEO Projectplace International AB, about the future of SaS the Swedish company Projectplace is European market leader for Web-based project management. It is active for more than ten years in the highly competitive Internet market and has many software vendors come and go. Pelle Hjortblad, Managing Director of Projectplace International AB, comments on current developments in the field of Web-based software solutions. How are his predictions for the SaS market? What are the success factors? And especially how the global economic crisis will affect the future of Web-based software solutions? Mr Hjortblad, your company was founded in 1998 in Stockholm, terms such as server, attachment, or wireless LAN for most were still foreign words. The Internet was in its infancy and nobody trusts has new techniques. Then how did the idea to found a company that offers something complicated like project management as Internet service? Pelle Hjortblad: at the time I was still working Managing Director of Tele2, a leading telecommunications provider with 24 million customers.
I’ve seen the first steps of project place only as external. When Mathias Hallstrom, Magnus Ingvarsson and Peter Engstedt announced at the end of the 1990s, document management and team work based on modern Internet technology to develop for a platform, I was absolutely convinced of the success of this idea. Today we already forgot what dimension did. You must remember that in the years 97/98 already first email programs existed, there was still no way to send documents. That was made at that time by mail also if the corresponding data were already burned on CDs. At the same time, one could observe first influences of globalization; the number of international and distributed working teams rose sharply. Therefore the Projectplace founders wanted to create with its software a platform, facilitated the collaboration and document exchange especially exactly these teams. In the back of the head they had in particular numerous projects of the European Union, which at that time were launched.