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April 28, 2008
Swiss IT firm picks Orem as site for North American headquarters
By Debbi Olson
The Enterprise
Switzerland-based Wendia AG International, a provider of information technology service management software solutions and one of only 13 ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) certified companies in the world, has opened its North American headquarters at the Canyon Park Technology Center in Orem.
Wendia North America will be led by Hal Tueller as chief executive officer and Kevin Goertsen as chief technology officer.
"Since the start of Wendia in 1990 it has always been the goal to open an office in North America," Tueller said. "We are moving quickly to establish our presence throughout the U.S. with the addition of integration partners in Salt Lake City, New York, Chicago and through recent new partnerships in the Pacific Northwest."
Wendia will establish it presence in the United States initially through creating relationships with Value Added Reseller (VAR) partners that will be recruited by the company to sell Wendia's software products to its established clients.
"That's a more effective approach when opening up another country than trying to bring on a big staff and trying to leverage relationships from sales people," Tueller said. "That is how we are going to exponentially grow our business -- to take our products to market through existing partners who have existing customer bases that they have sold to for years."
In the Utah market, Wendia has created a new partnership with IBS, which will be the VAR for its products and provide installation and integration services.
Wendia International chose Utah as its North American headquarters in part because Tueller already lived in Utah, having been the president of Salt Lake City-based TecServ Inc., and also because of the state's high quality and respected information technology reputation.
"Utah is the mini Silicon Valley," Tueller said. "I think there are some of the finest technology companies around here."
Wendia International is a software company that provides service management software that companies use to communicate, track and process all of their internal communications with their employees and their customers. The company has more than 15 years of experience in providing service management solutions to a current customer list that includes more than 250 organizations worldwide. It offers solutions that includes service design, help desk, business process management, workflow process management, asset and inventory management and change management. Its major clients in Europe include Scandinavian Airlines and the Sweden Poison Control Center.
The company's software integrates easily with all of the major desktop solutions, including Computer Associates, BMC's Remedy, Altiris, Zenworks and others, making them easier to use, more effective and easily customizable.
"The three things that would set us apart from our competitors is that we're easy to install and implement, we're extremely customizable and flexible but still giving you a lot of out-of-the-box functionality, and then we integrate very well with other systems, network management, desktop management solutions that customers already have and would expect us to integrate with," Tueller said. "I think our speed of integration, speed of implementation and our commitment to ITIL from the ground up really sets us apart."
ITIL is a set of best practices recommendations and guidelines for companies that want to build an effective service management environment. The standards were formed approximately 18 years ago in Europe and have been the standard for European and Scandinavian IT companies.
"By the end of 2009, 70 percent of U.S. companies are expected to embrace ITIL and use it as their set of best practices for their service management solutions," Tueller said. "We have the highest ITIL ranking and certification you can have in the industry. That's why the company flourished in Europe and that's why we think the timing is perfect for us to grow in North America, because ITIL is being embraced in North America and now is the time for us to provide a fast, flexible and seamless tool to the U.S. market. We certainly have competitors, we have the big players like IBM, CA, HP and BMC; all are players as well that are very effective. I think our speed of integration, speed of implementation and our commitment to ITIL from the ground up really sets us apart."
Within the next two months Wendia North America is planning to begin hiring a sales force that will work to recruit new VAR partnerships throughout the country in order to build the company's presence in the United States.
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