The U.S. enterprise resource management firm Planview is buying Sweden’s Projectplace, the provider of project management tools such as the recently-launched ToDo. The companies didn’t disclose the purchase amount, but the combined operation will have an annual turnover of more than $125 million, with customers such as Sony, BP, Vodafone, Hallmark and U.S. Airways. The merger’s benefits are partly about geography – Projectplace gets to push more easily into the U.S. and Planview into Europe – but also about complementary product portfolios. Projectplace’s cloud-based software is used for project-based collaboration, while Planview’s high-level tools are really for executive decision-making.
“It’s two combined product sets that have no overlap,” Projectplace managing director Johan Zetterström told me. Planview CEO Greg Gilmore, meanwhile, said the combined line-up would give “small teams all the way through to enterprise workgroups” a framework for doing what they do.
The combined operation will have two business units, Planview Enterprise and Projectplace, the services of which will of course be integrated. According to Gilmore, the two companies already had joint customers, some of whom have already tried out and invested in the joint package.
“You can do project execution and Kanban in our service, and have that followed up and planned in Planview Enterprise,” Zetterström explained. “The integration work will be done quite soon. You can have a really large enterprise globally that uses Planview to optimize, but then they have underlying teams that need to collaborate … We believe we will have a killer product that no one else in the market has.