Last week the entire Clarizen U.S. team flew with Avinoam, our CEO, to Las Vegas to launch our new marketing campaign called "Kiss Microsoft Project Goodbye" at the Software 2008 / Interop conference.

Don't get us wrong, MS Project is not our direct competitor but it sure does come up very often when prospects contact us in search of something...different.

The term 'Project Management' carries with it much baggage of the past, and is frequently associated with old school solutions that intimidate the average user and require much training to get even the basics. Hence at Clarizen we shy away from using the term 'Project Management' and prefer to be categorized under 'Project Collaboration' or 'Project Execution' two key areas where solutions such as MS Project fall very short.

Clarizen takes projects beyond the Planning phase and keeps team members engaged and contributing also throughout the Execution phase via the integration of user-friendly collaboration tools, Web 2.0 style. Providing a centralized pure SaaS solution coupled with consumer-play collaboration and usability aspects, brings fresh air to the Project Management arena and an alternative to Microsoft Project and other incumbent enterprise solutions which have lost touch with their user base and been slow to migrate down the enterprise 2.0 path.