FrontRange fronts up for reseller drive

Mid-range CRM and service management vendor FrontRange Solutions is on the hunt for channel partners to spruik its relatively new HEAT product range and the latest version of IP Contact Center in the hope of doubling local revenues.

More channel partners are required despite the company recording solid revenue growth of 20 percent worldwide, up from US$16.8 million to US$20.2 million between 30 September 2003 and 31 October 2004.

The company’s product range is comprised of help desk, knowledge management, asset management, service level management and, as of the end of March, infrastructure management modules.

FrontRange is looking for 20 to 30 additional channel partners that have experience selling Computer Associates’ Unicenter or HP’s OpenView platform and are looking to diversify.

“I’m constantly amazed at how skilled our partners are with HEAT and Goldmine and how close they are to our customers,” said FrontRange CEO Mike McCloskey.

“But with products such as IP Contact Centre 3.7 coming out, the breadth of our product road map means that not only do we have to train our existing partners, but we also have to attract new partners in certain areas such as voice for IP Contact Centre and infrastructure management,” he said.

FrontRange has spent the last two years building IP Contact Centre from the ground up and by using the Microsoft’s .NET platform and a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) gateway.

The software can be deployed on standard Wintel hardware. “The result of this is that we can deploy a small to medium contact centre for one tenth to an eighth of the cost of conventional CTI implementations,” said McCloskey.

With its contact centre business growing at 27 percent, McCloskey is bullish about FrontRange’s prospects for 2005.

“Currently we’re getting six to seven percent of global revenue out of the Australian market but we want to double that to 14 or 15 percent. At the same time we’re looking to increase our headcount by another eight to 10 people, mainly in sales and our services area.”

Such aggressive growth targets are nothing new for FrontRange, however. In August 2004, the then-strategic alliance manager, Richard Dufty, who has since defected to Microsoft, highlighted the company’s goal to double revenue by the end of the financial year.

While FrontRange’s Goldmine and HEAT products have traditionally been targeted at SMEs with between two and 250 sales, marketing and administration staff and multi-channel contact centres with five to 100 agents; the company has been increasing its penetration of the distributed enterprise market.

“We’ve got half the Fortune 500, half the Fortune 100 and three quarters of the FTSE 100,” said McCloskey.

“In the current climate, even large enterprises are moving more towards point solutions rather than overarching enterprise-wide implementations,” said John O’Brien, FrontRange’s Asia-Pacific VP.