FrontRange Solutions leads the pack in total enterprise solutions: 40 to 50 percent growth projected!"The Boardroom Report" provides the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) An integrated information system that is used to plan, schedule and control the presales and postsales activities in an organization. , customer interaction and call center industry's view from the top, featuring the sector's first in-depth, exclusive CEO-to-CEO interviews with leading executives regarding industry news, analysis, trends and the latest developments at their companies. As the industry's leading publication since 1982, it is our responsibility to recognize leaders with the best minds in the industry and share their vision and wisdom with our valued readers. Technology Marketing Corp. founder/chairman/CEO Nadji Tehrani Nadji Tehrani is an American businessman, the founder and CEO of Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC), which publishes magazines and runs conferences devoted to the business of telemarketing, a word on which Tehrani himself holds a registered trademark. will interview the CEOs and Customer Inter@ction Solutions executive editor Glenn J. Kalinoski will edit the interviews. Michael McCloskey, CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of FrontRange Solutions This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications. Alone, primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of this article are not sufficient for an accurate encyclopedia article. (www.frontrange.com), was interviewed for this installment of "The Boardroom Report." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Growth Story FrontRange Solutions' growth rate over a sustained period of time clearly speaks for itself. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "FrontRange has grown every single quarter for the last seven quarters [in terms of] revenue and profits," CEO Michael McCloskey said. "It's by far the most exciting time in the company's history. "My guess is we will grow in the 40 to 50 percent range this year over last year. We have a lot of new products coming to the market [and] we have a very sustainable product line." The Company Founded in 1989, FrontRange Solutions develops software and services focused on solutions tailored to the mid-market. It boasts more than one million users. "We target the small to medium enterprise ... and we do it with enterprise-class products, but in a way that is very inexpensive [with a] lower cost to deploy and with the application functionality that large enterprises have." When asked about the success, McCloskey shifted gears and said he views his company as something of an untold story. Our Greatest Challenge "Our greatest challenge is to get more notoriety NOTORIETY, evidence. That which is generally known. 2. This notoriety is of fact or of law. In general, the notoriety of a fact is not sufficient to found a judgment or to rely on its truth; 1 Ohio Rep. and to get more recognition in the enterprise solutions marketplace. If we could get people to recognize who we are, then I think we could prove ourselves and prove the values we offer as a company. We're not quite as well known from a marketing point of view as many other larger companies." Case studies and examples of customer satisfaction are part of educating the marketplace for FrontRange. "The key for us is creating awareness through different media types--through print [and] ... Web marketing." Core Competency A core competency is something that a firm can do well and that meets the following three conditions specified by Hamel and Prahalad (1990):
When asked to define his firm's greatest core competency, McCloskey stated that he believes being able to identify high-growth areas is FrontRange's forte An application development system for enterprise client/server environments from Sun. It was folded into the Sun Studio compiler and tool suite, which is based on the open source Netbeans IDE. . Huge call centers do not represent the company's sweet spot. The target market includes facilities with between 25 and 75 seats. "We have CRM, service management and voice products, and we're good at identifying problems in companies and then devising solutions around those problems. When people are buying these solutions, I think they are buying them for branches or divisions of large enterprises. That's one area that's done extremely well for us. "[This includes] the small to medium enterprise companies ... [that] need to have some contact center functionality--a call center--or they need to be able to provide exceptional customer service. The problem is they don't have a huge amount of money or huge IT organizations. That's why we can [offer] a product like ours that is very inexpensive relative to the competition but also has a tremendous amount of functionality that you can run right off your server, so you don't have to add additional equipment or do anything else." The IP Contact Center Product The company's IPCC See IMS Forum. (IP Contact Center) product includes features such as real-time 1. real-time - Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds). Process control at a chemical plant is the classic example. and historical reporting; an agent dashboard (1) See Mac Dashboard. (2) A software-based control panel for one or more applications, network devices or industrial machines. Dashboards display simulated gauges and dials that look somewhat like an automobile dashboard. ; advanced skills-based routing; a Web-based application See Web application. builder; and a virtual agent. "We're just working with two very large companies that should go live with [the virtual agent] this week. We are definitely seeing people take a look at and deploy the virtual agent. The cost savings that you get through that kind of technology is really fantastic." Providing Products Down Market When asked about the most exciting opportunity for the firm, McCloskey said it is the chance to offer FrontRange products "down market." "The thing that's prevented a lot of companies from being successful is the complexity and the cost of these solutions. We may still see consolidation in terms of vendors in the future. But I believe the real impact will come from advancements in the actual technology. "We've taken IVR (Interactive Voice Response) An automated telephone information system that speaks to the caller with a combination of fixed voice menus and data extracted from databases in real time. , ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) A computerized phone system that responds to the caller with a voice menu and connects the call to the appropriate agent. It can also distribute calls equally to agents. , PBX (Private Branch eXchange) An inhouse telephone switching system that interconnects telephone extensions to each other as well as to the outside telephone network (PSTN). , skills-based routing, voice recording, quality management and written that [into the] software. We're going to have these huge, legacy hardware platforms Each hardware platform, or CPU family, has a unique machine language. All software presented to the computer for execution must be in the binary coded machine language of that CPU. Following is a list of the major hardware platforms in existence today. See platform. out there and try to tie them together, and that really creates a big problem for the customer. The industry is in a transitional period and solutions like ours are going to be the future of the industry." Reaching The Home Agent McCloskey also believes FrontRange will be able to reach the home agent market with its hosted solution. "We have not as aggressively yet targeted that market because ... it's a relatively young product and we want to spend a quarter or two making sure that we just get it all proven and where it's operating very well. The home agent market is growing very rapidly and we're extremely interested in taking some forays in there. We will begin to launch some activity into the home agent market probably around January [2006]." For more information regarding FrontRange Solutions, visit www.frontrange.com. |
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