We’re extremely pleased to welcome Magnus to ftrack! Magnus is driving the future of ftrack alongside our development team as our new CTO. We sat down with Magnus to discuss his background, his day to day, and his plans for ftrack in the coming months…
What are your main responsibilities as Chief Technology Officer at ftrack?
Primarily, I am here to build, lead, and nurture each individual on the ftrack development team and help them to deliver their best work! Alongside this, I am responsible for things like implementing the ftrack product strategy, overseeing architecture and system changes, and communicating what’s happening with the product to our stakeholders.
I also research key features to ensure that development on ftrack meets both our customer and our market requirements. I also go to lots of industry events to promote the magic of ftrack to those that haven’t yet been exposed to it!
Magnus Eklöv
CTO, ftrack
What interests you most about the media and entertainment industry?
It’s absolutely the people. They’re open-minded, competent, and impressively skilled. I’m hugely impressed by the extremely complex productions their studios and production teams deliver around the globe.
I feel a great sense of pride in adding value to this work, in making project and asset workflows much easier to tackle. It’s exciting to build a platform that can support the industry’s individuals and help them to create bigger and better work.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
I love software development. The combination of strategic work and close collaboration with people is stimulating. I am a people person, after all, and prefer to work in an environment where everyone works together to reach goals. That is absolutely the case at ftrack. It also helps that we’re making excellent software that gets the job done. I’m really driven by that, and I get to do it every day at ftrack!
What is your background prior to joining ftrack?
I have worked in the IT industry for over 20 years. My experience largely lies in software development and managing teams. Most recently I worked at ADITRO, a HR platform for enterprise businesses that makes admin work simpler.
What are you most proud of in your career?
Contributing to the transformation of a legacy HR Suite to a modern Cloud solution for Nordic Enterprises. Also, managing a ceremony in Åre with Carl XVI Gustaf the King of Sweden…but that’s another story.
What attracted you to working with ftrack?
My first meeting with our CEO, Fredrik Limsater. He introduced me to the creative industry and presented the background of ftrack and his vision for its future.
After our meeting, I was introduced to the team, and we instantly connected. It’s a tight team packed with experience, development skills, humor, and team spirit. I felt that we could do great things together and that my experience would really benefit ftrack. I’m excited about where we’re taking the product next.
And where do you plan to take the product next?
We want to make ftrack easier to use than ever for all roles, from producers to coordinators, supervisors, artists and beyond. We also want to make even more robust integrations for our customers.
Real-time engines, in particular, have real potential to revolutionize the creative industry. We want to ensure that ftrack is there to help support these new real-time workflows, which is why we recently announced our Unreal Engine, Unity and Perforce solutions.
We will support all ongoing development work with continual customer collaboration. We want to ensure that our ftrack Review and ftrack Studio platforms continue to meet the needs of creative teams and to solve the emerging problems that they face. We can only achieve this by staying in touch with our users and understanding what they need from us to do their best possible work. So…watch this space for more developments!
What are your hobbies outside of work?
I like sports, running, working out and skiing in winter. I spend time a lot of time with my family and friends relaxing at our cottage. I also spend lots of time with Netflix and HBO…you can’t beat a good show!
Want to try ftrack Studio or ftrack Review to see how it can optimize your studio’s efficiency?