Local customer relationship software and services provider FrontRange is looking to expand its African footprint. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, the company has 130 000 customers and 1.2 million users worldwide, and is now looking for new markets close to its original home.
FrontRange Solutions (SA) product manager for Africa Paul Bornhutter says Africa is pretty much untouched territory for FrontRange. "We plan to pinpoint certain opportunities," he says, "particularly around HEAT and GoldMine to start off with, exploit those, and grow our African customer base with partners in those regions."
The company has partnered with an SA-based channel organisation that has 20-odd resellers in the regions that FrontRange aims to target.
"Right now we're probably going to focus on east Africa," he says, "for two reasons. Firstly, east Africa really has the infrastructure for our applications; the region is ready for CRM tools, ready for IT infrastructure management and ready to take on external customer service management."
Bornhutter says the company will start off in Uganda. "We have two major implementations there - Uganda Telecom and MTN Uganda - that we plan to leverage.
"As is typical in Africa, if you own the top companies or the top 10% of companies in a sector, from a product perspective it bodes well for you. You've got reference sites and the rest of the organisations will take notice, and it really does influence your buying cycle quite positively."
FrontRange is in talks at present to get its Africa ventures moving, and has some events planned to raise awareness in its chosen markets.
"We hope to hold the first by close of this calendar year," he states. "We're going to see how that pans out, deal with opportunities as they arise, deal with partners. Once we've satisfied the business requirements in Uganda and have a good footprint, we will move out to the surrounding territories and then eventually move into West Africa."
In SA, Bornhutter says, FrontRange is looking to appoint partners in regions it hasn't traditionally had a presence in, like the Free State, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape. It is also looking for another partner in the Western Cape.
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