Software vendor StayinFront enters Europe

By ADAM GIFFORD

Customer management software vendor StayinFront has won an 11-country European deal with Roche, building on the strong relationship it enjoys in the Asia Pacific region with the Swiss pharmaceutical company.

The multimillion-dollar deal is one of the biggest the company has secured.

Asia Pacific manager Stephen Andrews would not reveal the value of the contract, but said the deal covered countries with fewer than 500 field sales reps, including Britain, Ireland, Greece, Spain and the Benelux and Nordic countries.

It included Visual Elk software, implementation, integrated analytics and ongoing support, and would be rolled out over the next three years.

"The process will be to agree what is a core system for Europe, put in the standard underlying pharmaceutical libraries, add any Roche work we have done to date and localise it for each country," Andrews said.

Visual Elk's object-oriented data model means it can be quickly configured for use with an existing business structure without time-consuming programming, and delivered across networks, the internet or to personal digital assistants.

Andrews said StayinFront won Roche's New Zealand business more than five years ago and had picked up other countries around the region as the firm looked to replace systems.

"To get stuff approved in Asia Pacific it has to go to headquarters eventually, so we must be reasonably good here to get a referral," he said.

While Visual Elk is used by a wide range of New Zealand and Australian businesses, elsewhere in the word StayinFront has concentrated its sales effort on pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods companies.

Andrews said many of the staff being hired for an expansion of its Ponsonby development centre would work on making the product comply with new United States requirements for pharmaceutical sales.

StayinFront is boosting its research and development staff by more than 60 per cent to help with the development of the next generation of StayinFront's Visual Elk customer management and sales force automation product.