FrontRange Solutions To Dive Into Hosted Applications

A hosted version of the GoldMine contact management application is slated to debut in the first half of 2004, to be followed with a hosted version of the Heat support-desk offering late in the year, said Kevin Smith, vice president of products at the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based company.

FrontRange's base of 1,300 partners will be able to share in the revenue stream flowing from those applications going forward, Smith said. The new offerings will be built atop FrontRange's emerging .Net-based CustomerIQ platform. FrontRange was an early public adopter of Microsoft's .Net framework plans.

FrontRange CEO Michael McCloskey said the upside is tremendous now that the ASP model has been validated after an initial boom-then-bust. FrontRange will be priced "a bit lower" than Salesforce.com, and the company will "use its channel tentacles to capture business, McCloskey said. "This is a huge market. If we capture just 5 percent of it, that's a $30 million business," he said.

Nathan George, vice president of Enterprise Computer Solutions, a Dallas-based FrontRange partner, is bullish on the move. "When we go into an account with GoldMine and Heat vs. Saleslogix or others, if hosting is important to the customer, we're out of the picture," George said. "This way we can stay in the fight."

In the near term, FrontRange plans to unveil Heat 8 with an updated Windows XP-like user interface, better support for LDAP directories and Business Process Automation tasks. Heat competes with similar offerings such as BMC Software's Remedy and Computer Associates International's Magic.

GoldMine 6.5 promises better and tighter Outlook integration so that even users without Outlook can share calendar information and more customizable fields, tabs and views.

Pricing for both offerings remains unchanged from the current releases. Heat costs $3,250 per seat, with volume discounts kicking in at five seats or more. GoldMine Business Contact Manager is $99 per seat, and the Corporate Edition is $495 per seat.

But observers say FrontRange faces a tough battle. Many executives, including then-CEO Patrick Bultema, left the company last spring, and "that's a red flag," said Kelly Spang Ferguson, an analyst at Current Analysis. "They say they're in the next phase of growth strategy, and that's fine, but if you consider the broader market conditions, they face a battle."

And last week there was further consolidation in the CRM space, with Onyx launching an unsolicited bid for Pivotal Software. Siebel Systems earlier bought Upshot. At this point, all CRM vendors have to consider hosting, Ferguson said.

ECS' George said FrontRange, even in the face of the Microsoft CRM onslaught and consolidation in this space, remains well funded and managed.