A newly established technology company, Agilitude, hopes to capitalise on the fast growth of cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software developer Salesforce.com.
Agilitude has a powerful board of directors. Chaired by former South African Revenue Service CIO Ken Jarvis, the board includes former Anglo American chief technology officer Steven Sidley, and Bruce Maclaren, previously with IBM and Nedbank. Quinton Pienaar, who was formerly CIO at Mix Telematics, has been named as CEO.
Pienaar says there are already a thousand companies using Salesforce.com products in South Africa, but that Agilitude is the first official reseller.
Based in San Francisco and listed in New York, Salesforce.com has a market value of more than US$25bn and has expanded from CRM into social media solutions for business. This involves building communities for employees and customers to communicate and collaborate.
Julian Martingano, regional sales manager at Salesforce.com, says the company handles 1,2bn transactions each day and is appealing to businesses because it is wholly based in the cloud, meaning there’s no need for capital expenditure on hardware, infrastructure or software.
“It’s a subscription model, so there’s minimal capital outlay,” Martingano says. “Your payments are fixed and scalable as your company grows. You’re not tied to one technology and if you want to change solutions your data belongs to you and there are systems in place to extract it if you want to move.” — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
