SharkPro Software founder and Chief Executive Greg Bailey says the key trend in project management is technology moving to the cloud, enabling project managers to be freed from endless e-mail chains and helping them develop more effective, collaborative and social workflows.

People want to go to the cloud. People are trying to develop more collaborative-based project management workflows which are less formal, more social” said Bailey, whose SharkPro Projects software helps companies make effective use of Microsoft Project.

The Houston-based company is releasing apps in January in Microsoft’s Marketplace. SharkPro SharePoint Insite for Project and SharkPro Project View for Project Web App will cost just $29.95 to download. But Bailey believes they are game changers for his fledgling company.

“This allows us to sell to international customers without having to actually touch them,” Bailey told MPUG in an interview. “There might be 10 or 20 million users of Microsoft Project out there. There are a lot of users who use Project Desktop that may or may not ever use Project Server. This is a way to make it easier for them to get to that next level to get to Project Server.”

A major Wall Street bank, he said, might have 10,000 users of Microsoft Project but only one in 10 might use Project Server. “We could actually help the rest of those users start to use Project Server easier or start to use Project and SharePoint to collaborate better,” Bailey said.

“This dramatically increases our number of potential customers and it gives us a much more globalized presence,” he said. SharkPro has partners in Britain, Germany and Australia and releases its software in English, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

It’s clear that Bailey loves his work. He gets excited talking about how the new tools will be used in the workplace, such as a hospital. “The new apps are designed for the Chief Information Officer or somebody walking around with their Windows 8 slate tablet and a doctor comes up and asks what the status of his project is? The CIO can now answer that, real time, right there with his tablet.”

Bailey declined to discuss revenues since SharkPro is a private company, but said, “Our growth rate has been astronomical.” SharkPro was recognized as Microsoft’s 2012 Project and Portfolio Management Partner of the Year, just two years after Bailey founded the company to help customers get a faster, more affordable and easier way to interact with Microsoft Project.

The company has particularly targeted hospitals, healthcare providers, life sciences concerns and financial services firms by making sure SharkPro has readymade workflows and dashboards that meet their needs.

That negates the need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars having bespoke software configured and is a much quicker way of getting started on Project Server, Bailey said. “We typically are reducing the cost of getting started with Project Server by about two thirds,” he said, adding that customers are up and running on Day 1.

The main reason SharkPro Project Server can get up and running so quickly is that as well as being available for on-site installation, it is also hosted in the cloud with customers billed at a rate of $20 per user per month.

Author, Mark Egan works as a business writer and editor in New Jersey. He can be reached at markbegan@mac.com.