SaaS aids SME project management

Growing numbers of businesses are turning to software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions as they look to boost innovation while cutting back on costs in the wake of the global economic downturn, says Outsourcery.

In particular, SaaS delivery models are making project management software increasingly accessible to smaller organisations, within both the public and private sectors.

Writing about the future of IT project management, Stacy Goff, president of ProjectExperts, predicted that IT organisations are being forced to respond to the "most treacherous recession in memory", with many smaller enterprises now seeing the benefits of cost-effective project management software.

Integrated Web-based project management tools are the elements of an emerging form of cloud computing, reports InformationWeek.

One firm behind such tools is Elementool, a company that supplies online project management services. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and New York, it is also an experiment in integrating a set of related services on the Web.

Elementool offers software project issue tracking as a service; help desk customer service; project manager time tracking and cost projection; software test case management; file sharing; document creation' and forum generation. The services are integrated on the Elementool site so information gathered by one tool can be imported into the next.

A primary value-adding strategy for organisations after the difficult economic period is to further improve project management, according to Computerworld.

In view of this strategy, the project management software industry's future looks especially promising. During the global recession, industrial countries around the world devoted billions in economic stimulus funds for infrastructure and other projects. This has created considerable demand for project management software.

The market for project management software and services totals about $1.2 billion annually, according to Forrester Research.