US-headquartered Fraxion, a cloud-based procure-to-pay solution with an innovation hub in Cape Town, South Africa, has launched into the North American market following a merger with eRequester, an established US e-procurement software suite.

According to Fraxion, the merger provides "an enterprise-grade, native cloud spend enablement solution to the underserved mid-market."

The company's innovation hub is based in Cape Town's Southern suburbs and its team of development and international support owns the product development for the roll out of cloud solutions.

"Our South African team is currently 25 strong and utilises the Microsoft stack to deliver .NET MVC code base on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. With our QA function based in Seattle, we are able to run a continuous development/test cycle over 18 hours a day," reads a statement by Fraxion.

Stanton Jandrell, co-Founder and CEO of Fraxion, said, "Our vision is to simplify spend control globally, shifting spend management to spend enablement by offering a cost-effective, comprehensive platform to mid-market companies. eRequester and Fraxion share a culture of excellence and personalised service, and I am confident that the combined organisation will surpass the expectations of customers by delivering a much-needed solution in the US."

Fraxion believes mid-size businesses are making strides towards controlled spend management, but have yet to reach the efficiencies enterprise peers are experiencing.

Instead, millions of dollars in procurement transactions are still being managed using outdated or paper-based processes.

The intention with a spend enablement platform is to provide purchasing leaders visibility of expenditure at every transaction stage and "ultimately identifying common spending trends and forecasting for the future."

Africa's take

Fraxion says it has experienced a huge uptake of its SaaS model and the promise of lower initial costs, no hardware investment and shared managed environment delivered on a subscription basis with localised pricing.

"... (this) ensures cost-effective access to enterprise level software. We occasionally come across some organisations where cloud, for regulatory and in some instances scepticism over reliability, has meant reluctance to migrate to our preferred delivery channel. In these instances, the mature, field-tested, on-premise solutions provide a gateway solution until perceptions change," the company adds.

Fraxion maintains that its merger with eRequester represents a clear opportunity for growth among South Africa-based software developers and other skilled employees.

"We are thrilled to be on the forefront of this, and join companies like MRI that have recognised Cape Town's unique lifestyle and talent repository," the company stated.