Company Description
FirePond is a leading provider of integrated e-business sales and marketing
solutions that enable companies to optimize their customer relationships and
maximize the effectiveness of their Internet-based and traditional sales
channels. We provide software and services that allow companies to merge their
e-commerce selling, customer relationship management, and channel management
strategies on a single, Internet-based platform.
Our FirePond Application Suite allows companies to deliver highly
consistent and personalized interactive buying experiences to their customers
over the Internet, as well as in more traditional selling channels, to increase
customer conversion and retention. Our products are able to link information
obtained from business-to-business or business-to-consumer e-commerce
transactions into traditional sales channels, where it can dramatically improve
the effectiveness of both sales models. Our products can also deliver
information from these interactive, Internet-based transactions into the larger
enterprise, where real-time customer interactions and transactions trigger
coordinated, customer-focused processes based upon the company's common view of
the customer. This customer-centric approach allows companies to manage their
ongoing sales, marketing, product planning and fulfillment activities in a
fashion that maximizes the lifetime value of each customer relationship.
We target the largest 2000 companies in the world, commonly known as Global
2000 companies, in selected vertical industries that are typically characterized
by complex products, services or channel relationships, including health
care/insurance, financial services, high technology, telecommunications,
automotive/trucking and manufacturing. Our customers include ADP, Empire Blue
Cross Blue Shield, KLA-Tencor, Renault V.I. and Sprint. We sell our products
primarily through a direct sales force which is distributed throughout North
America, Europe and Asia.
Our goal is to be the leading provider of integrated e-business sales and
marketing solutions. To achieve this goal, key elements of our strategy are to:
- leverage our vertical market focus to translate customer requirements
into deeper e-business application functionality and expand into new
vertical markets;
- exploit our established international infrastructure to target leading
businesses worldwide;
- utilize our unique development organization to rapidly expand our
products' e-business application functionality;
- expand our relationships with system integrators and complementary
software vendors to expand our market reach and implementation capacity;
- provide a range of product packaging options in order to better penetrate
Global 2000 accounts; and
- leverage our 16 years of implementation expertise to deliver optimized
solutions for our customers.
We were incorporated in Minnesota in 1983 as a provider of custom developed
interactive selling solutions. We undertook a strategic restructuring in late
1996 to focus on providing more standardized software products. We later became
a Delaware corporation as a result of a reincorporation merger effected in
, 1999.
|
