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Øyvind has been working from Houston as long as I’ve been in Omega. I’ve meet him a couple of times. We (me, him and his brother Johnny) also had a typing contest a couple of years ago. I didn’t have a chance! But, at least I’ve beaten Johnny a couple of times, so I’m hoping to beat Øyvind when he’s visiting us the next time.

Do you remember your first day in Omega? What was it like?
I’ve had many first days in Omega…The first working experience with Omega was about twenty years ago when, as part of a two-week school-sponsored practical work program, I was assigned to Omega. The first task was to write some code on what I believe to remember was SuperBase on Atari, to scan through all names in a database and convert them to Sentence Case (instead of all UPPER CASE).
In 1997 I did some work for them in Stavanger while working for my own company, and in January 1998 they wondered if I was interested in going to Venezuela to implement PIMS. This sounded exciting, I didn’t know anything about the country back then, but I said yes and went scrambling for summer clothes in Stavanger in January 1998. After searching in the store’s back-rooms, I ended up with a few short sleeved shirts with screaming colors, like orange and glowing green and yellow, and went off. This was my first major international assignment, and I haven’t stopped since!

How long have you been in the states? What’s your role there?
I moved to Houston in June 2002, and been here since, interrupted by another project in Venezuela 2003-2005. Here I am responsible for all market activities, business development, client and personnel activities related to PIMS and consultants in the US. I also get involved in advisory roles and project management as required by clients.

Is there any new projects coming over there?
We just reached agreement with a multi-billion dollar project in Malaysia to implement PIMS R3 as their Project Information and Cost Management system. This is an exciting opportunity for the fortunate people from Omega that will go – not only because it is an extremely important PIMS R3 Cost implementation for a major project, but also because they will be able to brag about having worked in the famous Petronas Towers (once the tallest building in the world)!

You’ve just started using wave. What do you think about it?
After having seen the demo, I got sandbox access to Google Wave back in August, and have played just a little bit with it so far. I think it is a promising tool, and merges ideas from mail, TeamDocuments, Messenger and other apps into an interesting mix. The Robot features, a path Microsoft was following for a while with Messenger and later scrapped, hold a lot of potential for creating some clever applications. But for years to come, it is going to be a novelty with limited use for enterprises, and will not pose any threat to established players. I think we will see some cool apps for consumers, though, and long-term the Wave will likely little by little find its way into the enterprise as well. If anyone needs an invitation to the preview, drop me a note. I still got 7 left.

Besides computers, what do you do on your spare time?
In my spare time I spend a lot of time teaching my daughter (3 ½ years) computers; currently teaching her how to move windows around! Apart from that I read a lot, walk, eat & drink, and smoke an occasional cigar while dreaming about getting time to play golf. I have a genuine interest in all sorts of technology – the latest gadget I am waiting for is the Tacx Fortius Multiplayer bike system, which I am going to use to beat Johnny real-time in cycling!