By Sponsored Video 2

It’s no secret that Autotask has big plans for international growth in 2012 — and in fact has already started its quest for worldwide expansion by opening an office in London. Autotask CEO Mark Cattini believes it is a natural progression for a company boasting customers in more than 50 countries, and it’s a move that’s beneficial for both Autotask and its partner community.

“We looked at our customer list around the world and it turns out we have customers in 54 countries,” he said. “Our efforts haven’t really been focused as an organization to date — we’ve been fairly opportunistic and we’ve done quite well, and so we felt there was a bigger opportunity for us and our customers internationally. So we’ve invested significantly.”

Cattini described his strategy in this FastChat Video:

So far, Autotask has opened an office in London with 14 employees providing sales, support and implementation, and has hired or is in the process of hiring team leaders in Australia, Germany, China, Japan and southern Europe. The idea, Cattini said, is to have the leaders on the ground and “building the teams around them as we learn about the markets.”

“We also announced that we would be translating our software in six different languages, so we will have German and Chinese in the January/February [2012] timeframe and Japanese, Spanish, Italian and French in the March [2012] timeframe,” he said. “We’ll see how they go and then take it from there, but there are other languages we’re also considering.”

Such moves not only expand Autotask’s footprint, it also gives Autotask’s customers better coverage in areas where they traditionally haven’t been served.

“Even without the internationalized product at the moment we’ve seen a dramatic increase in our new customer acquisition. Our existing customers absolutely love the fact that we’re on the ground and committed,” Cattini said. “What we found in the international geographies is we haven’t seen anything that’s quite like our product, delivering the efficiency and the insight our product gives — which our customers in the U.S. and elsewhere have enjoyed for years — there isn’t anything we think quite like that in the other geographies. We are bringing the full richness of Autotask to the marketplace and so our customers are going to benefit from a product that basically wasn’t available to them in their own native language.”

Autotask, he said, plans to work with those customers directly as well as distribution partners that understand and work with those partners “… to make this offering to them as efficiently as we possibly can.”