Project management software specialists Clarizen held a user group lunch in central London today to continue CEO Avinoam Nowogrodski’s series of face-to-face customer meetings.

The Cloud Circle was a guest at the do, held at the swanky Babylon restaurant at the Roof Top Gardens in Kensington.

Clarizen was founded in Israel in only 2007 but has quickly become one of the leading project management suppliers on the market. The company sells its project management system as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service. The company sells to any sized organisation, from a single user to tens of thousands of accounts. The company’s niche, it says, is that it provides bottom up rather than top down solutions meaning that somewhere in the region of 80 per cent of people within an organisation will derive benefit directly from its tools. Prices sit at around the $25 per user per month mark with discounts for multi-tenancy. 

Nowogrodski told the congregation of around a dozen that, being primarily a web-based company, he feels it is important to meet customers face-to-face himself for the sake of transparency. Today’s event followed similar ones in Israel and the US.

The chief executive used the occasion to detail the company’s plans for opening a new office in Germany and to include permission features in the next version of Clarizen. He also stated that the company has now managed to source $36m in venture capital funding and is signing up 150 new customers per month, with a total of over 2,000 worldwide.

Asking for feedback from the end users present, Nowogrodski was told that all in all the product had provided great benefit to organisations but that some more levels of user authority would be useful , beyond the very low or full use options that are currently available, with a  pricing structure that reflects usage. Nowogrodski pointed to the permissions addition in the upcoming version 5.3. “We like to make one big functionality addition with every release,” he said. 

Customers present at today’s event included the record label EMI, the charity Sue Ryder and business consultants Accenture.

Clarizen has its own data centres in Israel and the US and further offices in the UK, France, Germany, Australia and Taiwan.