Hungary’s SandMark Solutions, which provides turnkey sales and marketing solutions incorporating information technology for medium and large-sized businesses, has announced it is setting up its regional base in Bahrain.

Managing director Balazs Szekely said the company, an exhibitor at Gulf Industry Fair, saw good prospects in the region with several companies showing an interest in its products and services. The company, founded in 2006, currently sells scalable and customisable products in the fields of real estate and online advertisement markets. Its services are based on the team’s multiple man-years of web development and business consultancy experience and include branded social networks, web application development and online marketing services.
As well as Hungary, the company has clients in the UK and the US including important players in the mobile telecommunications, real estate, publishing and healthcare industries. These include Vodafone and Red Bull.
Commenting on the business environment in the Gulf, Szekely said he was impressed by the development that had occurred and the amounts being spent on infrastructure. “The companies we’re targeting in the region are those that have some sort of Internet presence and are utilising it for some strategic reason,” he said. “These are the companies that create the core of our future customer base. Within that context we’re looking at telecom, banking and FMCG organisations.”

Introducing Web 2.0
Szekely also said SandMark would introduce Web 2.0 to Gulf companies, suggesting that local parties would appreciate its importance as a collection of new technologies and new philosophies that presents a new way of looking at information on the Internet. Web 2.0 includes but is in no way limited to such things as rich internet applications, social networking, user-generated content and video and audio offerings.
“We believe we can take Web 2.0 a step forward; it will be beneficial to businesses in the Gulf,” Szekely said. “It’s not a temporary hype; it is definitely a new wave of  tools that enable businesses to better understand their customers’ requirements, opens new marketing tools such as viral marketing, provides state-of-the-art methods to enrich the “experience” in the consumers’ purchasing process. It is a new phenomenon that is definitely reshaping the entire Internet business and with it the offline business as well.”
Szekely said SandMark had started negotiations with potential clients but was aware of the need to understand the local culture and local requirements before it could incorporate the technologies that had taken off elsewhere.
“Most importantly, we want to create a locally (GCC) customised version of the services,” he said. “For example, we are into implementing social networking solutions in the world of Internet which means we give tools to connect people with each other and do lots of interaction on the net, and we do this in the context of a business enterprise.
“We create social networking for business purposes, marketing purposes, market research purposes, raising brand awareness and so on. But to be able to provide a localised version of such software, we need to know what the local conditions, local people and local culture can accommodate.”
Szekely said SandMark was committed to building a truly international team which would include those who understood the people and the region as well as professionals from the rest of the world, especially from Eastern Europe, SandMark’s base. The company has partners in the UK and US.
“I see this as a key to providing invaluable services to companies in the GCC. We don’t want to rush things. We want to understand and be understood. We are quite confident that we do have the expertise, knowledge and best practices which can be converted to business value. By that I mean enabling companies to be stronger against their competition, be more supportive and humanistic towards their employees, and to improve their own culture – business and organisational – that could contribute to raising the level of overall well-being.”

Recent solutions
SandMark comes to the Gulf having successfully provided Vodafone Hungary with a corporate website and adjacent interactive applications. It introduced a completely new design with AJAX user interface elements in user-intensive, business-critical areas.
Customer interaction is enhanced with logical and easy-to-navigate site structure. New technologies like RSS and a reliable site search were also introduced. The new website plays a crucial role in strengthening the market position of Vodafone in the heavily competitive mobile communication business.
The company also provided Vodafone with a mini-webshop which would serve as a simple online sales tool. It built a simple but stylish microsite in record time together with appealing online banners that generated outstanding click through rates. The site was further developed to become a multi-product mini-workshop from a single online tool.
SandMark also  created online marketing support for almost all campaigns of Vodafone Hungary.  It created special banner-sized webshops, the so called BannerStoreTM-s and other creative solutions to boost sales and raise brand awareness.
Full integrity with the main online presence and harmonisation with all ATL and BTL communication is provided for the client. Web 2.0 solutions and social networking elements are combined with traditional web elements to reach the highest possible user experience.
For the MobiAd network, the task was to establish a news site for mobile advertising professionals within the very short time of three weeks, creating  corporate brand identity elements (including a logo) from scratch to enable content management for editors with very limited programming skills.
SandMark  created a fully customisable branded news site with the help of Wordpress engine and custom skinning. With the blog-like CMS, editors can easily change content through the web. Additional plug-ins allow a wide range of communication with the users as well as full control on advertisement management.
“It was a high-value solution for the money. The client could meet short deadlines and spread the news around the new site on the 3G conference in Barcelona. Revenue was generated through banner and sponsorship advertisements on the site within four weeks from project start,” a SandMark statement said.
For Prestige Towers, one of Hungary’s most prestigious real investment projects, SandMark delivered a tailored version of IRMA, its community-based interactive residence management software
A combined issue-tracking and social network solution was built for the client. The highly functional issue tracking system was based on the open source platform Mantis, while the social network part is a SOA platform-based custom development with branded skinning. The solution not only supports communication between the maintenance team and flat owners, but also allows third-party service providers to join the community against a fee. The owners can track all property-related and the usual residence/living issues through the system.