Staffing boost at software company

By ADAM GIFFORD

Customer management software developer Stayinfront is boosting its Ponsonby-based research and development staff by more than 60 per cent, bucking a tendency by American-controlled companies to pull resources out of the country.

Chief technology officer Tony Bullen said he was looking for 18 staff to help with the development of the next generation of Stayinfront's Visual Elk customer management and sales force automation product.

Bullen said the company was increasing its research and development spending by about US$1 million ($1.6 million), keeping the total at about 10 per cent of revenue.

In the year to March 31 the privately-owned company, which has its headquarters in New Jersey, almost doubled its revenue to US$35 million.

The company uses a mix of its own and Microsoft development tools.

Another five staff will be added at the company's other development centre in Portland, Maine, to work on scaling products to bigger users.

"We want to accelerate our R&D programme, particularly on ways to improve the analytic side of CRM," Bullen said.

"The idea is to take the cool things in Panorama, which is our data analysis tool, and make them pervasive in Visual Elk.

"We also want to do more with web services, particularly with enterprise integration, so you can publish parts of your CRM to partners or customers."

Visual Elk users who currently want to share leads with partners have to give access to the system through a web client, rather than being able to just export the relevant data into the partners' own customer management systems.

Bullen said improving the analytical power of the software and integrating the results into workflow would keep Visual Elk at the leading edge of the technology.

"It means you can do things like work out who are the most likely customer defections, and hook that up with workflow so you are actually doing something about it," he said.

"Analytics had a bit of a false start because people were getting tons of data but it was not hooked up to any workflow."

While Stayinfront has customers across a range of industries through its legacy as The Great Elk, globally it concentrates on the pharmaceutical and consumer goods industries.