MIP, one of South Africa's leading developers of financial administration software solutions, has been named Progress Software's Africa Partner of the Year.
The award, designed to promote innovation and recognise the business value of partner solutions, was presented at Progress Software's business forum conference, held in Portugal this year.
“We had a very strong year in revenue terms,” says Richard Firth, CEO and chairman of MIP. “We also updated all of our systems, which are based on the Progress OpenEdge platform, and we experienced strong growth in the last half of the financial year.”
Firth expects the trend to continue despite the economic meltdown, with financial pressures helping to swell MIP's customer base.
Two of the key differentiators MIP brings to customers are its risk-based billing model and low cost of ownership.
“The risk-based billing model shares the risk between us and the customer,” says Firth. “We bill customers on a monthly per-member or per-policy fee based on volumes, with no capital outlay. We also use a sliding scale to reduce marginal costs, which includes upgrades and any other value added items for the system. When times are tough people don't have money to throw around and the ability to pay a fee commensurate with their growth is enormously beneficial.”
MIP services the healthcare, life assurance and employee benefits industries with its tailored range of systems based on a common design. It has also entered the lending and treasury markets.
They were designed to specifically support later additions and ease of use, attributes that are absolutely critical in environments where changes occur rapidly through market forces, internal business change or legislation.
“Our products can also be configured quickly and only require bare bones customisation before they are ready to process claims,” says Firth. “We really focus on no-fuss integration to make them simple and easy to use and we use one database for all our products so there's no need for data warehousing.”
“Progress Software and MIP have formed a great partnership in the last decade,” says Progress Software South Africa MD Rick Parry. “We now generate more than half of our annuity revenue through the risk-based, or software as a service model, and MIP has played a key role here. It is the largest revenue contributor to our revenue for this financial year.”
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