Parature Names Fran Witzel Vice President of Sales
Reston, VA (April 21, 2003) – Parature, Inc., an innovator of online support software, today announced that Fran Witzel has been named vice president of sales. In the newly-created position, Witzel will oversee Parature’s sales and business development activities across all vertical markets. A technology industry veteran, Witzel brings to Parature more than 25 years of sales and business development experience.
Witzel comes to Parature from The Morino Institute’s Netpreneur Program, an organization dedicated to helping Greater Washington entrepreneurs grow their businesses. During his six years with Netpreneur, Witzel helped grow the program into an online business community of more than 12,000 people, including the majority of early stage venture capital firms investing in the Mid-Atlantic region. He created the program’s Investor Services education and investment deal flow efforts, facilitating eight seed equity investments within two years, resulting in three lucrative exits and four companies still operational today, including Blackboard Inc., a profitable company with more than 400 employees and $100 million in equity funding.
Prior to his tenure with the Netpreneur Program, Witzel held senior sales positions at Computer Associates, Legent Corporation, and Morino Associates. Witzel received Computer Associates’ quarterly quota award and the Compass Club award for annual sales achievement. Earlier in his career at mainframe software maker Morino Associates, Witzel was a top revenue producer, helping the company achieve Inc. 500 awards with more than 500% growth in five years. Witzel later lead his sales team as Director of North American Sales, increasing revenues 38% while directing the deal structure and negotiation of Morino Associates’ largest sale ($1+ million) to General Motors/EDS.
“Recruiting Fran Witzel is a big win for Parature,” said Duke Chung, CEO of Parature. “He’s been a member of our advisory board for several years, and now it brings me great pleasure to have him join our team full-time. Fran’s extensive sales and business development experience, along with his executive management experience, will help Parature reach its next level of growth and maturity.” Witzel also was responsible for strategic planning, market analysis, M&A evaluation and negotiation at Morino Associates. He worked two acquisition and alliance deals that strategically positioned the company to enter the growing distributed computing market. He also recommended acquisition of a software technology that became a multi-million dollar product line.
In addition to his corporate sales experience, Witzel has operated his own business, Pragmatek, helping technology companies with sales and marketing in the client/server, groupware, workflow and document imaging markets. Witzel’s accomplishments for his clients included recommending a product positioning strategy that resulted in the client closing six-figure customer deals for a client with an average deal value of less than $20,000.
“Parature represents a dream opportunity for a sales and business development executive,” said Witzel. “The company already has solid client successes like HP, IBM and Philips, yet the majority of growth is still yet to come. I see tremendous potential for Parature to serve both small- and medium-sized businesses that are adopting CRM for the first time, as well as large companies that have been burned by traditional CRM vendors and are looking for a more effective, lower-cost solution. In addition, other verticals such as higher education have already started flocking to Parature for student and faculty support.”
Source: Parature