SaaStock 2017, the biggest conference in Europe for global SaaS companies, opens today Monday September 18 at the RDS in Dublin and continues until Wednesday.

The event has a strong representation of Irish companies who will be hoping to catch the attention of potential clients and international investors. Tickets for Tuesday and Wednesday are on sale priced at €499 incl. VAT.

SaaStock17 has 120 speakers, three stages, a dozen satellite events and  50 SaaS companies in the Software.City. Attendance is expected to be around 1,500 people, including 200 investors.

The Irish speaker and discussion panel line-up includes:

• Des Traynor (pictured), co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom. He is opening day two of the conference with Christoph Janz, managing partner of Point Nine Capital.

• Peter Coppinger, co-founder and CEO of Cork company Teamwork. He kick-started SaaS Network Ireland, his attempt to help make Ireland the center of the universe for SaaS. His keynote is ‘Bootstrapping Teamwork.com to $18m ARR: Lessons learned building Customer Success and Sales’.

• Ronan Perceval, CEO and founder of Phorest, which has €10m in ARR. Before Phorest, Percival was co-founder of Demonware, which was acquired by Activision Blizzard for €13m. his talk theme is ‘A no BS guide to achieving a $45,000 LTV and a sub-5% churn rate in the SMB space’.

• Dave O’Flanagan, founder and CEO of Boxever, which has raised $19m so far. With its business intelligence and marketing product, Boxever is the first company to apply a good machine learning solution to the travel tech space. At SaaStock he’ll participate in the CEO panel, ‘Build and Scale Your Startup: Lessons learned and what to avoid to find long term success’. Also on this panel is Duncan Lennox, co-founder and CEO at QStream.

• Claire McHugh, co-founder and CEO of Axonista. Which provides creative, interactive media solutions for the TV networks and video companies. Axonista recently launched a project with the Irish Film Institute to stream the IFI Archive on phone, tablet and other TV connected devices. McHugh is on a panel discussing how to build a presence in the US.

• Joe Morley, director of Global Marketing Partnerships at Facebook, is sitting dwon with Anssi Rusi (CFO and COO of Smartly) for a fireside chat on the them of ‘Maximising product development speed through company culture’.

• Rory O’Driscoll, General Partner of Scale Venture Partners, was born in Ireland and now resides in San Francisco. His current investments and board roles include Box, DocuSign, DataSift, DroneDeploy, Katch, OneLogin, Pantheon, WalkMe, and Wrike. Hear what he thinks about what many say is the next big opportunity at SaaS when he delivers his keynote speech, ‘Does AI matter for Enterprise Software?’

Other Irish SaaS founders and executives in attendance at SaaStock

•  Eamon Leonard, Cohort. The company is funded by Irish Angel investors and based in Dublin. Previous to Cohort, Leonard co-founded Orchestra, which was acquired by Engine Yard in 2011.

• Siobhan Hasner, HireHive. Based in Cork, HireHive is a bootstrapped company that doubled in size just last year. Managing director Hasner has been with the company since 2015.

• Conor O’Loughlin, Glofox. Its  studio management software that allows owners to monitor and grow their business. The business started it in Dublin in 2014 and earlier this year it raised €2m, whose origins trace back to meetings O’Loughlin had with Partech Ventures and Tribal.vc at SaaStock 16.

•  Luca Boschin, LogoGrab. This helps tech companies, agencies, and others better understand how consumers and creators engage with their brand, and with that understanding comes the opportunity to monetize.

• Paul Quigley, NewsWhip. The NewsWhip tools track stories and trends over and throughout all the niches of social media. The company announced a Series A earlier this year, led by Tribal.vc.

• Paul Campbell, Ti.to. Online platform for event organisers to sell and manage tickets. Working at the intersection of e-commerce and SaaS, SaaStock uses the product.