Fendahl’s quiet start to 2020 did not last and the vendor ended up having a good year according to Henry Thornalley. “We kept running at full steam,” he said. “And ended up signing four new customers.” Fendahl also hired three new sales staff and has a very strong pipeline, he said. “We see a lot of smaller firms that were running on spreadsheets or paper now shopping for commercial solutions and a lot of larger projects that had been moth-balled in the spring started coming back to life in the summer,” he said. He promised a string of new announcements in the next few weeks. New customers include companies in the fruit and meat side of commodities that involved integration with a container management system, a couple of new customers on the metals side. An existing customer also doubled the number of users it had licensed to use the system. The pipeline includes a lot of smaller opportunities, he said, but also an increasing number of larger ones as well.
Henry is also bullish over North American energy as Fendahl has now built out North American gas with all major pipelines covered in the solution. They expect to announce a new oil & gas customer in North America this year that Fendahl has been working with for many years, he said. “This will also provide impetus as references in that market are important,” he told me. It is also seeing some larger opportunities in Ags & Softs ranging across from grains to spices and nuts – the entire gamut of that group of commodities in fact. “Ags and metals seem to be very active at the moment,” he said. Interestingly, there are also some more exotic opportunities in the market, he told me such as water pipelines, Cannabis and Cannabis waste as well as unlisted agricultural products.
Henry also commented on the sales process. Buyers are requiring many more demonstrations than in the past apparently. He attributes this to the nature of selling remotely where it is more difficult to build rapport and trust with potential customers. He also sees buyers taking a more rigorous approach to software procurement generally.
Another highlight of 2020 was Fendahl’s development of a freight module. It had immediate success with it and signed its first customer for the module in 2020 and is already implementing it, he told me. In other developments, it has also rolled out its Chinese UI and is rolling that out to a customer while working on Spanish and Portuguese UI’s as well.
