GLOVent has been developing and selling Community Management Systems for more than 10 years. Currently more than 600 communities are using GLOVent’s systems/solutions throughout South Africa and internationally.
GLOVent has been focusing more and more on building a scalable business that consists of excellent products and solutions that can be deployed at a large number of communities throughout the globe.
Change is constant in the environment we operate in. Although GLOVent has innovated and changed since inception, we realised it was time for some major changes in our organization. These changes are driven by a number of factors, which include:
Change in technology: Technology is changing rapidly which influence the systems and also the needs of our clients. We have been keeping up with technology the best we could with the systems we have, but every now and again a total redesign and redevelop of the systems are needed. As most know, we had an attempt of a relaunch of our core system (GLOPortal CMS 1.0) last year which has unfortunately not been successful. We are excited that we got it right this time and we are launching both a totally new CMS (Community Management System) called GLOVent CMS 4.0 and member application.
Growth in the business: We were fortunate to experience significant growth in our client base over the past years. Over the years we manage to on average add about 3-5 new communities (mostly estates) to our client base each month. Growth is great, but it does not come without its unique challenges. The biggest of these is to find a model where individual, personal service remains possible, while staying focused on developing leading and scalable products.
General learning: Being more than 10 years in this business and the experience of offering Community Management Systems to more than 600 communities have offered us a large amount of learning opportunities. We are aiming to learn from our previous successes and failures, and we are hoping to deposit a lot of this learning in our new systems and delivery processes.
Driven by these factors and more, the following major changes are being implemented at GLOVent currently:
The launch of the GLOVent Community Management System 4.0 with associated member applications. Our core product, GLOPortal CMS is being totally re-written on the latest technology in the Microsoft echo system, using C#, .NET, Microsoft’s microservices (which include Azure) and Ionic for the mobile app. This new technology will amongst other benefits offer a more powerful, scalable and user-friendly solution to our clients. We also used the opportunity to incorporate our learning over the past years into the design of the new system, to hopefully offer a solution that solves the needs of our client more effectively.
Exciting new partnerships that bring more elements of a total Community Management System to our clients. The new system is allowing more effective integration into 3rd party system providers through which we will be introducing a whole set of new solutions. These include business process management systems, mobile payment solutions, a capital reserve management system and service and many more. The way some of the core features of the current system is performed is also renewed, hopefully resulting in a better system to our clients overall.
The introduction of a new delivery model through the establishment of an Accredited Consulting Partner network and local accredited 3rd party service providers. GLOVent originally followed a ‘direct sales model’ with centralised support and account managers. As the business grew, the limitations of such a model became apparent. This resulted in the implementation of a decentralised Consulting Partner model. This model has been researched extensively and it was found that many major software providers like SAP, SAGE, Microsoft, Salesforce and more are following this approach. The base philosophy behind the model is for GLOVent to focus on designing, building and supporting a world class Community Management System, while a decentralised accredited Consulting Partner Network focuses on deploying the solution with clients in their area, offering them individual and personal service.
A new look and feel. Then finally a new look and feel, for no other reason than we felt that would be nice as well.
The process we are embarking on are big changes that will be implemented gradually. Our ultimate goal has always been and remains to satisfy the needs of our clients better. We will therefore be in constant consultation with our clients to ensure we are moving closer to this goal with these changes. In line with this we will be hosting workshops in a number of areas in South Africa over the next month or two. We would like to invite all interest parties to attend these sessions where we are planning to go into more details on all of the above and then look forward to the opportunity to listen to and discuss any concerns or suggestions.
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