FrontRange Solutions

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FrontRange Solutions

Type	Privately Held Corporation
Founded	Colorado Springs, CO (1989)
Headquarters	Dublin, CA
Key people	Michael McCloskey, CEO
Industry	Computer software
Products	GoldMine HEAT IT Service Management Infrastructure Management Customer Service Contact Center Sales & Marketing & Relationship Management
Revenue	$90 million USD (2004)
Slogan	Master The Dynamics Of Change
Website	www.frontrange.com

FrontRange Solutions is a midrange developer of CRM, Communication Management and IT Service Management software with worldwide headquarters in Dublin, CA. FrontRange is best known for its two products; GoldMine and HEAT which are used by more than 130,000 companies and over 1.2 million users worldwide. FrontRange customers use this software to maintain customer contacts, automate sales processes, manage documents, and provide help desk services.

[edit] History

FrontRange Solutions was formed in 2000 with the merger of three existing software companies owned by the South African software holding company FrontRange Limited (formerly Ixchange). These companies, Bendata, GoldMine Software and Maestro Commerce all focused on relationship management software with each having a certain speciality.

HEAT from Bendata - Help desk
GoldMine from GoldMine Software - CRM
Maestro Commerce from Maestro Commerce - ecommerce

In 1998, the South African Ixchange first purchased Bendata, maker of the HEAT help desk package, and then acquired GoldMine Software Corp. The idea at the time was to create a merged CRM/Help Desk application to continue the growth of the respective companies. Of other interest, in early 2000, an ecommerce ASP company named Maestro Commerce, was acquired by GoldMine and rolled into the FrontRange Solutions family of companies. With industry wide financial woes after the dot com crash and the 9/11 attacks FrontRange decided to close the Maestro Commerce division and license the intellectual property to BX, a Rhode Island based technology services company.

On November 4th 2005 Francisco Partners announced their intention to acquire all outstanding shares of FrontRange Solutions for nearly $200 million dollars (USD). On December 23, 2005 Francisco Partners completed the acquisition through the purchase of all outstanding shares. On January 9th 2006 all FrontRange shareholders received a distribution of 5.37 rand per share and the following day the company was delisted from the JSE. One main goal of the acquisition was to relocate FrontRange from the JSE to a US based market.

On March 12th 2007 FrontRange acquired the German based software company Enteo for an undisclosed sum.

[edit] Competition

Because FrontRange competes in five closely related but discrete markets within the software industry many different companies can be considered competitors. With that said, listed below are the major competitors of the company.