Panviva Cracks US, UK Markets

Panviva, a vendor of performance support products, has announced the general availability release of SupportPoint in the US market, part of the Down Under vendor's long-term business strategy.

The Melbourne, Australia-based vendor reported last year that sales to overseas markets, including North America, the UK and Asia accounted for approximately 50 percent of its sales.

Effraim Herskovic, general manager of marketing and corporate at Panviva, told industry observer Fleur Doidge, which wins this reporter's Pronounceable Name Of the Week award, that the Aussie developer landed its first overseas deal two years ago -- a small contract with HP -- but that "export sales had swelled to account for 50 percent of its turnover" in the first six months of 2005.

"It's been growing steadily and probably really ramped up in the last six months. It shot up from the low teens," Herskovic told Doidge, adding that most of its sales were coming from the US and UK.

SupportPoint is a specialized knowledge base product that provides fast, targeted access to structured documentation about complex systems, processes, and products to help employees execute tasks and processes correctly. The latest release of SupportPoint offers a new browser-based viewer to provide remote and off-site users with anytime, anywhere access to context-specific knowledge.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, September 1-3, 2009. Los Angeles, CA.

Effraim Herskovic, currently serving as Vice President of Panviva, noted that training and retraining "can be a costly and time-consuming effort, as is help-desk and post-launch support for new applications. SupportPoint offers an alternative, building training into the job by delivering context-specific knowledge to users at the moment-of-need -- and providing on-going support in a knowledge base that's current."

The product is designed to document and deliver knowledge in a simplified, standardized way, and "accelerate user adoption and compliance for enterprise applications like ERP and CRM across an organization," according to company officials.

Herskovic told Doidge that there's a certain Australian prejudice against homegrown developers, but out of the Great Southland there are few competitors for the company internationally. "It's still a fairly niche market. There's still probably only half a dozen companies that specialize in the area of performance support. Most of our competitors are in the US and a couple are UK companies," he told Doidge.

SupportPoint is also being used by contact centers around the world to reduce upfront customer service agent training, and put, as company officials describe it, "easy-to-use, self- service support at agents' fingertips."

Along with the addition of a browser-based viewer, SupportPoint's new features include built-in access to the SupportPoint Portal, an online library of tools for audit logging, license management, downloads, and more, as well as Active Directory support, for secure single sign-on and user authentication capabilities.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

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