Morten Olsen

Morten Olsen Email and Phone Number

IT Advisor @ bmi.studio
Copenhagen, DK
Morten Olsen's Location
Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark, Denmark, Denmark
Morten Olsen's Contact Details

Morten Olsen personal email

About Morten Olsen

‘Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well’ (Stanhope) is my principle. It’s not a about 'gold plating' or perfectionism - a quick win is preferable to a slow defeat :) But don't let instant gratification tempt you to ignore the past, disregard the future or act to the detriment of your customers.Ensure future business agility and remember that ‘the best generals are those who arrive at the results of planning without being tied to plans.’ (Churchill) because "no plan survives contact with the enemy" (Moltke). Nevertheless, "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail" (Franklin)Take things in their stride and always keep in mind that ‘success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.’ (Churchill)Pursue tangible outcomes and not just KPIs because ‘not everything that can be counted counts, not everything that counts can be counted.’ (Cameron)Be aware of habits ‘for our habits make us, and we make our habits.’ (Edwards)Finally - and more boring - some quotes from Thomas International (PPA psychometric assessment) about me:VALUES TO ORGANISATIONHis biggest value is enthusiastically communicating his vision. His optimism and forthcomingness is inspirational and he could well be the natural leader in an organization. He likes challenges and setting goals for others. He does not take ill-considered decisions but prefers to consider alternatives before deciding. DESCRIPTIVE WORDSAppreciative, asks ‘who’ and ‘why’, coaching, communicative, competitive, deliberate, fact driven, friendly, good listener, humorous, independent, informal, influential, inquisitive, orderly, organizer, persuasive, persistent, optimistic, positive, reliable, self-confident, strong-willed, verbal and vigorous.CHARACTERISTICS- exerts influence and persuades to get his will- has a calming and stabilizing effect on other people- is a loyal relationship builder that gains other people’s trust- achieves results in an organized and deliberate manner- good verbal communicator- vigorously ties up loose ends and closes tasks- motivated by specialist knowledge and expertise

Morten Olsen's Current Company Details
bmi.studio

Bmi.Studio

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IT Advisor
Copenhagen, DK
Website:
bmi.studio
Morten Olsen Work Experience Details
  • Bmi.Studio
    It Advisor
    Bmi.Studio
    Copenhagen, Dk
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  • Enterprises, Mid-Size And Start-Ups - Listed, Private Equity And Venture Backed
    Overview: Cxo - Vp - Senior Director - Enterprise Architect - Product Development - Board Member
    Enterprises, Mid-Size And Start-Ups - Listed, Private Equity And Venture Backed Jul 1981 - Present
    Below is a high-level overview of the positions I have held - the number of positions is due to Merger & Acquisition activity rather than attrition :) My trademark is versatility and adaptability gained from working in multiple start-ups, in mid-size companies with Private Equity ownership and in listed enterprises that have acquired the starts-ups.In the technology area, I have operated in both the Microsoft and Open Source worlds as well as private, hybrid and public cloud environments – I believe in ‘horses for courses’, i.e. selecting the appropriate technology after a holistic assessment of the situation.My main line of business is digital product and service development where I’m comfortable with software development as well as DevOps and Operations.2015-xxxx CTO/COO/Senior Adviser, Progressive - ITM82013-2015 Senior Director R&D and Operations, HighJump (that acquired Evenex)2011-2012 CIO and VP, Evenex2007-2010 IT Development Manager & Enterprise Architect, Experian2005-2007 CTO, NeoZone2001-2005 Director of R&D EMEA, Novell2000-2001 CTO and CEO (2001), SilverStream Danmark1999-2000 CTO, WAP portal1996-1999 CTO, United Consultants1993-1995 Business & Software Development Management, Abraxas International1981-1995 Co-founder and CEO of Abraxas DataselskabThree of the companies that I have co-founded have been acquired (United Consultants, Wapportal and NeoZone) and another built an international sales success by creating a new market niche (Abraxas). I have also participated in the sale of a mid-size company (Evenex originally known as DanNet). My span of control has been up to 90 persons (including offshore) and I have managed leaders of product management, PMO, architecture, development, test, devops, operations and service desk.More details about each position in the Experiences below (intentionally closer to blog format than CV format)
  • Progressive A/S
    Senior Business Consultant
    Progressive A/S Aug 2019 - Aug 2024
    Skovlunde, Capital Region Of Denmark, Dk
    I had continued doing consultancy work for Progressive after I left my former position. Progressive offered me a full-time position with a split role of supporting our CEO and Chairman of the Board.Initially I was participated in the tenders for Danish Fiscal Authority ("Finanstilsynet") and later a very substantial tender for Poul Schmidth ("Kammeradvokaten") who is the Danish states preferred law firm and one of the largest law firms in Denmark.Progressive won both tenders which naturally led to a review of our (Business Process) Management System and I became the business and technical architect of our new Business Process Management Platform as well as handling all aspects of the technical project management.The vision was to develop a holistic an integrated platform that included an IT Service Management system (ITIL 4), Information Security Management System (ISO 27001/ISO 27002) project management and documentation system with the added twist, that Progressive as a Managed Service Provider (MSP) has to ensure that the plat form would be multi-tenant and efficiently supporting a multitude of customers with bespoke services for each.. The vision was fulfilled using Jira Service Management, Confluence and Jira Software.In December 2023 Progressive merged in to ITM8 along with all the other brands in the group. I created transition sites with all the information needed for the Digital Platform Development team to understand the "as is" ITSM and ISMS platform in Progressive to prepare for the transition into the new group level systems.I also was in the bid team for a pharma customer and also created the QMS (Quality Management System) for a GxP audit.
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  • Greener Pastures
    Senior Business Adviser
    Greener Pastures Jun 2018 - Jul 2019
    Mumbai, Maharashtra, In
    Greener Pastures is one of Denmark leading app development agencies and was founded by 3 enterprising guys in my network in 2011.The company was very succesfull but the founders felt it was time for change of strategy and/or ownership. I participated in those discussions and established a data room for due diligence and I participated in the later sale/merger with Shortcut.I also participated in some aspects of the daily business development among other things creating a concept called "AppBooster" that companies who had received funding from the Danish states Innobooster program to get apps developed and funded in accordance with their financial and commercial circumstances.
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  • Progressive A/S
    Chief Technology Officer (Cto) / Advisor
    Progressive A/S Apr 2015 - May 2018
    Skovlunde, Capital Region Of Denmark, Dk
    Tim Wolf Jacobsen whom I worked for when he was the CEO of Experian Northern Europe had become the CEO of Progressive and convinced me to join as Chief Technology Officer (CTO).Progressive provided software development, hosting (private cloud), consulting and help desk services to customers which matched rather nicely with my breadth of experience as I had in-depth management experience in all the areas.Progressive had been growing rapidly as witnessed by the so-called Gazelle Award for five consecutive years. The growth had been both organic and fueled by acquisitions after a Private Equity partner had become the major shareholder.Initially the CTO role was the head of market and business development leading a team of Business (Product) Managers. I defined a new unified service catalog based on services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) that was implemented in our ERP system, so we had a consistent foundation for P&L analysis and a new pricing tool.I also participated in several tenders that all were rated very highly for their quality and I have created our new contract templates for cloud services.In addition, I assisted our CEO with strategy workshops involving the senior and middle management team where we created our business canvases. We decided to organize around our customer's Digital Transformation (DX) with teams for empowering their employees, engaging their customers and optimizing operations i.e. providing hybrid cloud services. The growth and company mergers had resulted in a highly-fragmented system landscape so I was asked to take over as COO for Datacenter & Platform Operations and Service Desk to get the infrastructure ready for the (hybrid) cloud era. It was necessary to drive a transformation program including data center migration and new servers, storage, firewalls, border routers and even cooling system with a minimal disruption of services. Being a software person at heart, I’m comfortable with DevOps and software defined datacenters (IaC).
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  • Highjump, Now Called Truecommerce
    Senior Director, R&D And Operations
    Highjump, Now Called Truecommerce Jul 2013 - Mar 2015
    HighJump (owned by Battery Ventures) acquired Evenex providing new business cards but work continued according to our long-term plan.We had decided to pursue an ISO 9001 certification with a clear focus on business value and a Quality Management System was established in the collaboration and documentation platform that I had previously introduced. The ISO 9001 audit didn’t find areas requiring process improvement and praised the QMS as ‘state of the art’ and noted, that it was the first audit they had conducted that was entirely system driven with the disaster recovery plan being the only external document.We needed to upgrade our entire infrastructure and I decided to seize the opportunity and migrate to new datacenters by operating in four-center configuration to ensure a smooth and robust transition of our services.Our back-end software was getting rather ‘long in the tooth’ so we created an architecture vision for future B2Bi platform based on a hybrid cloud model with elastic deployment and a continuous delivery model. Operational readiness and performance management was baked in from the start and I provided specific technology recommendations to be researched e.g.- Elasticsearch and Logstash for centralizing all logging- Apache Camel for support of Enterprise Integration Patterns- RabbitMQ- Karaf- Triple store (semantic web) for master data- SonarQube for code quality managementBottom line: During my stint at Evenex/HighJump we experienced a significant quality lift on the legacy solutions and achieved cost reductions (70% reduction in R&D and 80% reduction in Operations) while creating an innovative platform for the future.HighJump was acquired by Accellos (backed by AKKR). The efforts in R&D and Operations were twice an important part of generating a very significant ROI to our Private Equity investors.https://www.computerworld.dk/art/231438/dansk-it-firma-solgt-til-amerikansk-it-gigant-for-anden-gang
  • Timelog
    Board Of Directors
    Timelog May 2006 - Apr 2014
    Two of my employees from Wapportal (Søren Lund & Jakob Mikkelsen) had founded TimeLog in 2001 and asked me to join the board in 2006.It can require a delicate touch to be the sole non-equity board member among owner-managers and an investor.Nevertheless everybody made it work and TimeLog quadrupled during the period. More importantly the business model changed from a license model to SaaS which helped to weather the global financial crisis.In addition, a 'captive' offshore (in KL) development team was established as well as a Swedish sales office.
  • Evenex (Formerly Known As Dannet, Progrator And Progrator Gatetrade)
    Chief Information Officer (Cio), Vice President (Vp)
    Evenex (Formerly Known As Dannet, Progrator And Progrator Gatetrade) Jan 2011 - Jun 2013
    Russell Reynolds Associates headhunted me for the Global Director of R&D position, but after a few months the CEO asked me to become the CIO and VP.Evenex was originally called DanNet which was created as a joint venture between IBM and a Danish telco. Evenex was a leading provider of EDI (B2Bi) services, so I expected a fossilized but robust set-up. However, the company was dangerously close to a financial and technological melt-down.The culprit was a Purchase to Pay solution (PtP). The strategically sound idea of a PtP service on top of the VAN business had soured during implementation. Evenex had won a tender for the Danish state’s procurement system and the front-end was largely developed by a third party – Evenex was caught between 3.000+ requirements and an invoicing machine! The customer relation was tense due to problems in the solution.Meanwhile the old back-end software and infrastructure had been neglected because ressources and management attention had been required by the PtP solution.My remedies for the predicament:- Recruit, inspire and retain the right people- Establish an integrated management, collaboration and documentation platform- Transfer third party development (76.000 hours per year) to offshore captive teams in Manila (.NET) and Tianjin (Java)- Build the ability to maintain the old EDI back-end systems (C/C++ and Java)- Establish our own robust hosting active-active infrastructure able to run 24*7*365- Insource operations of front-end system (IndFak/PtP) from ATEA- Carve-out back-end system from former mother companies AIX environment- Migrate from a high cost hosted HP Quality Center and integrate new test management system in our collaboration platform.Evenex was the last company in a private equity fund (Warburg Pincus) and the C-level management was very active in the sale. Evenex was acquired by HighJump in June 2013. Our Chairman of the Board said that it was the most amazing turnaround he had ever experienced.
  • Experian
    It Development Manager
    Experian Jan 2009 - Dec 2010
    Costa Mesa, Ca, Us
    Experian asked me manage the software development team in addition to my EA duties.Our PMO had developed a very comprehensive ‘Full Project Life Cycle’ (FPLC) methodology to ensure sound business cases and consistent follow up of the projects with appropriate approval gates.The problem was that it had needlessly resulted in a waterfall development process. I wanted to achieve ‘disciplined agilization’ and chose Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM is the grandfather of agile methods) because it interoperated well with FPLC project framework.Another enabler of agilization was to drop the very detailed requirement specifications in favor of preto-/prototyping. Quality is important for customer satisfaction and I made product risk analysis part of the core development process. The Test Manager would be the ‘product owner’ of a new utility that would partly be used for data driven test, and partly be a tool operations could use for in depth analysis of application problems at run-time in the production environment. This was used for an advanced credit scoring product.Luckily Microsoft's ASP MVC framework was officially released just as we were to begin development of a new system for Experian Netherlands. I decided to base our future web applications on ASP MVC (instead of Sitecore or Webforms) which was a big improvement in testability and productivity. ASP MVC was also used in a customer self-service portal and for a future prototype for a unified UX for all Experian’s solutions (where all Experian’s products across business lines were mapped into the value chain).We also had to take over source code for a critical workflow solution for the RKI business unit because the (well-known) vendor was struggling with the complexities of the workflow. We would not be able to operate the new system in parallel with the old and we couldn't test with real data due to legal requirements (protection of personal credit data). Failing was not an option – and we didn’t.
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  • Experian
    Enterprise Architect
    Experian 2007 - Dec 2009
    Costa Mesa, Ca, Us
    Experian acquired NeoZone (see below) and the CIO asked me to move into this position.Experian Northern Europe was head quartered in Denmark and had subsidiaries in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Naturally there was a big variety of technologies and solutions and Experian wanted to re-platform and establish processes, guidelines and enterprise architecture that would enable the company to rapidly develop and deploy services.I was not all that keen on architecture of the software platform that had been acquired. But with experience comes pragmatism and from an overall perspective I found it more important to drive forward to generate business value than to be stuck in ‘analysis paralysis’. Hence, we launched an ‘early bird’ concept to quickly get experience with real-world solutions. We developed both an industry wide solution (telcos) in the Netherlands and a credit scoring product in Norway using the platform.The challenge was to move from a classical project approach with management of discrete projects to a holistic product approach consisting of creating reusable IT assets that could be used in a variety of products.The Business Architect and I defined a ‘rainbow’ concept. It was named that because we defined and color coded a service stack ranging from simple entity services over task services and utility services to fully fledged business modules. My mantra was 'Contract First' and I always insisted on starting with the definition of interfaces. In fact, we became so contract driven that we developed plug-ins for Sparx Enterprise Architect where Schemas, WSDL and C# templates were generated from our Sparx EA model of the service.As part of the mangement team I also participated in the selection of an offshore development partner. I was also responsible for onboarding the lead developers that had to work on new products. The offshoring program was a very postive experience for both the Danish team and the dedicated offshore team in Sri Lanka.
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  • Neozone
    Cto, Co-Founder
    Neozone Jun 2006 - Aug 2007
    Dk
    Johnny Bauer, Rene Madsen and I co-founded the company and recruited an additional three team members (Lasse Kaiser, Bjarke Mortensen and Michael Nexø) who had worked for me previously.We believed the geographical element was missing in typical business intelligence solutions and by missing or underutilizing that dimension resulted in loss of useful insight.The choice was between simple presentation tools such as Microsoft MapPoint or complex GIS solutions made for the likes of utilities (water, electricity, telco) that needed to diagram pipes and lines with great precision. Both types required installation of bulky maps on the computer.The idea was to enable ‘knowledge worker' (e.g. a typical MS Office user) to be able to work with their data in a geographical context by providing maps and data over web services. This was visionary at the time – Google Maps was first launched 4 years later and was an order of magnitude slower for geocoding!The product was called X-Point (‘crosspoint’) and was positioned at the intersection of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Executive Information Systems (EIS), and Business Intelligence (BI). The aim was to fulfil the top 20% of each category that is used 80% of the time.A central idea in the product was to create an ecosystem with a store which enabled ‘in app’ purchase of additional maps and data-sets. See http://www.x-pointcentral.dkWe also created X-Point Broadcast that enabled users to publish their geographical analysis to X-Point Reader as well an edition called RoadRunner for asset management (e.g. by Atkins for the Danish railroads) and capturing of data (e.g. Experian Catalist).I joined the company full-time when we had secured venture capital from Vækstfonden to embark on international expansion and Johnny (CEO) moved to London to develop the business.In July 2007 Experian acquired NeoZone and the X-Point version developed with WPF was rebranded as Micromarketer Xpress.
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  • Novell
    Director R&D Emea (Nsig)
    Novell Jun 2002 - May 2006
    Provo, Ut, Us
    Novell acquired SilverStream Software and along with that came the usual alignment of roles & responsibilities, products and plans.Novell was widely known for its Netware products but also had a very successful business with (now NetIQ) Identity Manager.SilverStream’s product suite was built on the homegrown J2EE application server that several companies had used as the foundation for software products. SilverStream itself had acquired some these companies (including Wapportal that I co-founded) and was creating a suite for rapid development and deployment of service oriented Web applications in the enterprise.The suite included an integration server (‘Composer’) that could expose back-ends (CICS, SAP, JMS, LDAP, EDI, etc) as web services. In addition, an interaction server (‘Director’) provided a portal, a rules engine and workflow.I was wondering how we could ‘connect all the product dots to a product line’and believed the emerging W3C XForms standard would be ideal for enterprise Line-of-Business applications in a SOA environment because XForms would send and receive XML data.XForms used the MVC approach where the model described form data, constraints and submission while the view described an ‘abstract UI’ that would be rendered by a so-called XForms processor. The form could validate data against XML Schema and included an action and event model for complex form behaviors.I convinced the senior management team about the business and technical benefits wrote several whitepapers.https://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/dnd20030904.htmlThe Danish development team was entrusted with this important development program and we joined the W3C working group: https://www.computerworld.dk/art/106396/dansk-udviklingsafdeling-er-central-for-novellWe developed both server-side and browser plug-in processors and supporting tooling. The result was our Director customers could create a master-detail-detail CRUD web application in a few minutes.
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  • Silverstream Software
    Cto (And Ceo Silverstream Software Denmark)
    Silverstream Software Jan 2001 - 2005
    SilverStream acquired the Wapportal because we had based our solution on their J2EE Application server. Our mobile transcoding technology and LDAP based provisioning module would be useful in SilverStream's interaction server called ‘Director’.A small anecdote is that we before the sale had our final management presentation in Boston during a December snow storm that caused a total black-out. We continued unperturbed in the dark and were all reminded of the value of meetings without PowerPoint The first task post-acquisition was of course to integrate the Danish R&D team and its technology into the new organization and product line.In addition, I was actively looking for development tasks with substantial business value that would be good for the very high quality R&D team I had recruited and had the privilege to manage.SilverStream was one of the early movers in the web services space and it was apparent that we needed an UDDI server. My team developed it on a very tight deadline because it had to be ready for a conference and some Proof of Value / Proof of Concepts that already had been booked at customers. We called it JEDDI (Java Enterprise Discovery, Description and Integration).SilverStream had developed a useful J2EE deployment Workbench that was morphing in to a full-blown IDE. We created the XML editor and XSLT Tooling and later were the front-runner moving these modules to Eclipse.This would eventually become part of the toolkit in Novell’s successful Identity Manager product.I also visited customers, either enterprise architects or technology executives in the capacity of a pre-sales or advisory role.Sadly, the acquisition also soon entailed that we had to lay off 2/3 of the Wapportal team and just keep the core technology team (12 persons). From a processual point this went smoothly and when SilverStream decided to close the Swedish subsidiary I was asked to negotiate with trade unions due to the Swedish Employment Protection Act.
  • Wapportal (Waptop)
    Cto, Co-Founder
    Wapportal (Waptop) Dec 1999 - Dec 2000
    After the sale of United Consultants to Corebit/Icon Medialab Johnny Bauer and I were pondering a new venture to be part of the frenzied DOT.COM wave rather than just being a technology provider.We believed the next big wave would be mobility and made a business plan for a mobile portal. We were inspired by the success of ‘i-mode’ in Japan that I had visited but wanted to base the solution on WAP (Wireless Access Protocol), which was an open standard. The idea behind WAPportal was to categorize all WAP services (Yahoo style) and enable the users to customize their phone with selected services.We discussed it with E&Y that suggested we should talk with two other guys - one of them was the leading Danish tele-analyst John Strand - who had paused their plans. E&Y set up a meeting and it turned out we had the same business plan but they had paused due to of uncertainty about the technical implementation. We joined forces and WAPportal was founded. Co-founder Rene Madsen and I put in long working days and nights for a month and the portal was launched in December to the surprise of the mobile operators who were developing their own ‘walled garden’ solutions in relative slow motion. John Strand did the PR and Johnny Bauer (CEO) did business development and investor relations.We attracted venture capital and recruited 30+ persons and began building a scalable technology platform. We were a web-services front-runner because the core modules such as mobile device transcoding and LDAP based user provisioning were loosely coupled modules communicating XML over HTTP.We also won a mobile software competition with a phone-controlled Lego Mindstorm robot :)The DOT.COM bubble burst in March 2000 which led us to refocus to B2B2C by offering our portal technology to mobile operators because we could easily brand it to match their respective design guidelines.The portal had been built on the J2EE server from SilverStream that acquired our technology in January 2001.
  • Abraxas International Aps
    Product Conception And Management Of Business & Software Development
    Abraxas International Aps Jun 1993 - May 2000
    Abraxas International was a carve-out of activities from Abraxas and a prime example of what you gain from observing users and applying technology to solve their problems.I had expanded the business from generic IT to the prepress industry because it was more interesting and profitable. The first offering was an OPI solution to minimize traffic of high-resolution images on networks to speed up the production workflow. Despite massive investments in digitalizing workflow the image masking (i.e. separating an image from its background) procedure was done manually using red foil and a knife. A prepress professional could produce a high-quality mask much faster than Photoshop. Insult to injury, an image masked with PhotoShop often couldn’t be printed (because the Bezier curves in a PostScript file became too complex).Sensing an opportunity, I scouted for mathematical and coding talent and was fortunate to meet Michael ‘Tox’ Toksvig whom I immediately employed when he graduated. I paired him with a prepress professional (Gert Juhl Jørgensen) and Tox single-handedly researched, architected, UI designed and coded the product which was named Touché.Initially Touché was a standalone program with a hardware control unit – doubling as a dongle - that was designed by Harrit & Sørensen and engineered by Beyerholm & Moe.We garnered customers all over the world (such as American Greetings) but the hardware and my time became a bottle-neck Next step was to create a PhotoShop plug-in version for Mac and find a channel to address the volume market. I hired Michel Nexø to implement the Windows versionWe met Adobe who referred us to Extensis (now OnOne) in which they had an investment. They became the publisher and named the product Mask Pro (later Perfect Mask). It became an instant hit in 1997 and professional desktop masking for ‘the masses’ was born!1 m. video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKF1pG5d0To1 h. video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FmPGzi5lbw
  • United Consultants
    Cto, Co-Founder
    United Consultants Aug 1995 - Dec 1999
    Johnny Bauer, René Madsen and I founded the company because we wanted to create a high-end consultancy that would attract and deploy the best consultants across borders. We were nearly 50 consultants (50/50 employees and ‘captive’ free-lance) with offices in 6 countries when the company was acquired by Corebit in June 1999.We initially focused on PowerBuilder because we had a common background with that tool. I had been looking for an enterprise RAD tool for Windows and found PowerBuilder before it was released and we had in a previous company become the first distributor outside the U.S.Johnny oversaw business development, Rene was a senior engineer and my primary function was to be part of recruiting and retaining staff, coordinating international activities and deciding and implementing our technology strategy.My strategic focus was to branch into developing mission critical web applications as opposed to web site ('home page') development. Because PowerBuilder was slow to get into this space we transformed ourselves to become SilverStream experts and got clients such as Maersk (Copenhagen), GE TIP (Amsterdam) and Merck (Bruxelles).I was both the bid and project manager for a new Y2K compliant case handling system at the Danish Tax Tribunal Court implemented with SilverStream. Happily, many years later I saw the following on the Tax Departments web-site:‘The National Tax Tribunal Court currently operates a well-functioning case handling and document management system……The system supports the workflow and simplifies the case handling work with a high degree of user satisfaction.’http://www.skm.dk/publikationer/udgivelser/5701/7.nemmereprocessergennemit/The secret to retaining our sought-after consultants was extensive team building and ‘spouse management’ :) We ensured that our globetrotting consultants' long-suffering partners were part of the community and organized 50-60 person delegations to software conferences in Vienna and Orlando.
  • Euro Plus Aps
    Interim Ceo
    Euro Plus Aps Sep 1996 - Jun 1997
    An international group of investors had founded Euro Plus to develop the next generation hotel TV i.e. the movie rental and interactive services. Benny Mieritz who arguably was ‘The grand old man of Hotel TV in Europe’ had been in the Board of Directors of Abraxas and he recommended me to the investors. My task was to advise on the internet and core software and Benny Mieritz’ company 2M Electronic was to produce the adapters for the TV sets.The intention was that I should join the Board of Directors of Euro Plus but it soon became apparent that a concerted operational effort was required to go from being ‘nearly ready’ to installing the solution at customer sites and generate revenue.Hence, the investors asked me to become the CEO with the task was of pulling things together. It was agreed that it should be an interim position (because of my other activities) where I should act as a catalyzer The supply chain extended from China to Denmark and sometimes into Eastern Europe because customs charges would make it advantageous to do local final assembly in pre-EU Eastern Europe. The initial idea was to have adapters for multiple TV manufacturers e.g. so Golden Tulip could choose TV sets from Philips. But we quickly realized that we would benefit from providing ‘our own’ TV set and found an OEM manufacturer (Vestel) in Izmir, Turkey that was remarkably flexible and could manufacture small batches to our specifications, so guests couldn’t circumvent movie billing (operating the TV without the remote).Conveniently I could combine visits to Turkey with visits to leads and potential partners in Cairo and Beirut. We managed to get the solution on the market and generate quite a reasonable revenue the first year. The solution was later folded into 2M Electronic and acquired by Locatel Europe Group in a transaction ‘worth more than in DKK 50 million’ (more than EUR 6 million):https://www.computerworld.dk/art/28194/dansk-hotel-software-solgt-for-millionbeloeb
  • Abraxas Dataselskab A/S
    Ceo, Co-Founder
    Abraxas Dataselskab A/S Sep 1983 - Apr 1995
    The company was co-founded with my cousin Mads Olsen by incorporating our ‘I/S’ (partnership). We started with pragmatic solutions such as a project management system for The Danish Navy.We had different backgrounds but were twin souls driven by solving challenges. Abraxas successfully undertook several ‘no cure, no pay’ assignments that others had given up on e.g. a system for sorting furs at Kopenhagen Fur or reverse engineering a Nixdorf protocol - obviously benefitting from Mads’ engineering background.Mads left to focus on his studies so I began refocusing the company to grow the business with several new activities:- We created a subsidiary for integrating computers with the leading PABXes. See DaTelCo- We made a very flexible contact and document management solution called IQ Office - We developed a service management system for a prepress equipment distributor and became their system integrator. This led to a masking product. See Abraxas International- Our conversion product ‘Filter King’ was nominated for the ‘Best Software in Europa’ award at CeBit.- We created a support BBS for customers but made it available to the public branded as ‘Danish Key Board’ also coming Denmark’s 3rd Internet provider breaking the ‘duopoly’ of the Linux User Group and University Computer Centre. When our modem (!) provider also became an ISP we changed to B2B and established a hosted internet mail gateway service- We focused on GUI solutions (before the Windows 3 market breakthrough) - and conceived the admin and workflow solution for The Danish Building Defects Fund. See Gazell InformaticAlas, the business grew but I needed to learn about risk management. When several large customers went into Chapter 11 Abraxas lost so much money that we had to divest activities and close the company. Not much fun, but I learnt a lot!Important persons not mentioned elsewhere were Tonni Hansen, Anette Graa, Morten Lauridsen, Lars Rasmussen, Kim Vigsbo and Lasse Kaiser.
  • Datelco
    Co-Founder
    Datelco Nov 1990 - Jul 1994
    The company was co-founded with Jan Langevad with the intention of developing what we called CAX (Computer Aided Exchange) to support phone operators an integrating with the PABX.I had met Jan at the FORTH (the RPN programming Language) Interest Group. We lived close to each other and got on well which lead to a discussion of opportunities.Jan had a technical background but was an account manager at CA. When visiting customers, he had noticed that computer support for the reception and phone operators hard largely been forgotten.We created DaTelCo as a joint venture between him and Abraxas with the aim to provide Computer Aided eXchange (CAX) to the Operators that would integrate with PABXes such as Ericsson MD110 and enterprise mail-systems.Tonni Hansen from Abraxas seeded the market while Jan finished the system in his spare time. This created sufficient momentum for Jan to leave CA and commit to DaTelCo.The company over time built a nice list of ‘blue chip’ customers (among other Denmark's largest universities, local councils and telcos).Jan was and is a playful type who wanted to create a family company to support his biking, paragliding and philosophy-reading lifestyle and I needed to concentrate ressources and attention on other initiatives (among them the masking software for the prepress sector described in the section on Abraxas International).We agreed that Jan as the key person should take full control of the company and he continued happily with it until his retirement.
  • Gazell Informatic
    Co-Founder, Board Of Directors
    Gazell Informatic Apr 1991 - Apr 1992
    This was the first of four companies that Johnny Bauer, René Madsen and I have co-founded. Broadly speaking Johnny has focused on external activities, Rene did software development and I have been the aligning business, products and technology.Johnny and I met at the Building Defects Fund where Abraxas was doing system analysis and implementation. A few years later (1989) Johnny and his friend René were running a tender for a large real estate developer and sent an RFP to Abraxas. My proposal was a solution based on Windows and Abraxas won over the big-name competition based on non-GUI solutions.My enthusiasm for GUI had started with Xerox Star in 1981 which I had experienced first-hand at Xerox while waiting 24 hours for a program to compile and link! Abraxas started offering Windows based solutions quite early but it was first with the arrival of Windows 3 in 1990 it was perceived as a viable option for general use.Due to the Windows pioneering efforts, Abraxas had the opportunity to distribute some Windows products but that didn’t fit the business model.Johnny and René had become GUI converts seeing the solution for their real estate customer and we founded Gazell with the intention of bringing GUI software into the enterprise. The main products were Dynacomm (terminal emulation), Forest & Trees (EIS) and PowerBuilder. Gazell became the first PowerBuilder distributor outside the US. While I can claim to ‘have discovered’ PowerBuilder, its widespread adoption in Denmark can solely be attributed to Johnny’s business development and René who trained brigades of developers.Many years later the inventor (Kim Sheffield) of PowerBuilder’s USP, namely the DataWindow, became my boss at Novell. Small world!At the Building Defects Fund I had specified a graphical workflow system and the Lead Architect Vagn Hjorth had designed a large set of beautiful forms. René developed a module ('ClickForm') to quickly convert these designs into a functioning solution.

Morten Olsen Skills

Software Development Integration Xml Enterprise Architecture Enterprise Software Web Services Strategy Business Intelligence Agile Methodologies Web Applications Management Cloud Computing Java Software Project Management Saas Java Enterprise Edition Project Management It Management Business Strategy Soa Ajax Agile Project Management Solution Architecture Architecture Change Management

Morten Olsen Education Details

  • Københavns Universitet - University Of Copenhagen
    Københavns Universitet - University Of Copenhagen
    Economics

Frequently Asked Questions about Morten Olsen

What company does Morten Olsen work for?

Morten Olsen works for Bmi.studio

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Morten Olsen's current role is IT Advisor.

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What schools did Morten Olsen attend?

Morten Olsen attended Københavns Universitet - University Of Copenhagen.

What skills is Morten Olsen known for?

Morten Olsen has skills like Software Development, Integration, Xml, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Software, Web Services, Strategy, Business Intelligence, Agile Methodologies, Web Applications, Management, Cloud Computing.

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