GRAHAM TECHNOLOGY has carried out a senior management shake-up to support a new strategy that has secured £5 million of contracts in the past five months.

The Renfrew software company has appointed Alan Porter, formerly in corporate finance at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, as chief financial officer to replace Kenny Bain, who is shuffling sideways to become director of channel partners. The business has also just appointed a new sales director, Stephen Haighton - the former director of key accounts at Energis.

Graham Technology, run by millionaire executive chairman Iain Graham, has seen a marked rise in sales since launching its new Ciboodle customer management software in October.

It is on target to earn £16m for the year ended March and has already booked first-quarter services sales that indicate it would be on track to reach £25m in 2008. Net profits for the year ended March are expected to be about £1.6m.

Managing director Mike Hughes said the company was benefiting from a revamped strategy that had focused on simplifying its core technology and selling through channel partners rather than a large direct sales force.

The global market for contact centre technology is estimated to be worth around $1.5 billion, but it is fiercely competitive.

Founded in 1989, Graham Technology has pipped much larger rivals such as Oracle, SAP and Siebel in the past to win software contracts with blue-chip banking, power and telecom companies. Its technology is employed in 2000-seat operations run by BT, Scottish Power, Indonesia's number one mobile phone operator Telcomsel and Eskom, which generates 95% of South Africa's electricity. Its technology platform can support up to 7000 users simultaneously.

But Graham has struggled to grow beyond its SME stature of 250 people despite opening seven offices and landing clients on five continents.

"We've been sitting at around £15m turnover for the last four years. There are certain things you have to break through to get to the next stage. It is to do with routes to market and how you create and capitalise on them. We tried to hire a direct sales force. The sales were fine but the profits went through the floor," Hughes explained.

Two years ago, the company cut 10 salespeople and closed its offices in France and Hong Kong to reduce overheads. It also abandoned its efforts to sell in China, which "was just too difficult". Graham still employs a small sales team but is now focusing on working with partners such as IT services company Dimension Data, PA Consulting and Accenture to secure contracts in new territories.

Dimension Data was instrumental in helping it land a deal to deploy its Ciboodle system in the call centre operations of the Standard Bank of South Africa, which is the country's largest banking group ranked by assets and earnings and employs more than 40,000 people. Falkirk Council and the ESPC are also among the new customers.

Ciboodle, which can cost from £50,000 to £5m depending on the complexity and scale of deployment, allows consumers to interact with call centres through automated "agent 247", which is able to adopt any accent.

The customer can also interact with a call centre through multiple channels such as live webchats, text, email, phone and even instant messaging. The system pulls together all of the information so that when a call becomes more complex and is routed to a human call centre agent, every past interaction via email or automated agent flashes up on the computer screen.

If the customer needs some help while doing a self-service website transaction, the exact same screen will pop up on the agent's computer and the two can go through it step by step together.

Hughes said that customers were finding it much easier to understand the business benefits in comparison to its previous software which was focused more on technical back-end systems.

But he is eager to accelerate Graham Technology's international push.

Graham recently announced that it would double its workforce in Jakarta, Indonesia, to 100 by July to help with software development and land more accounts. It is also hiring a further 50 throughout the rest of its operations.

Hughes said he was keen to break into eastern European markets such as the Ukraine and Russia; and was considering selling into India's fast-growing business processing market.

"In recent years, the industry in India has seen increasing costs and high staff turnover. They are looking for software solutions to improve service levels and reduce costs. That's what we do," he said, adding that it might enter the market by buying an Indian software firm.

"This is us moving to our next level of growth. We're 21 years into the business. We can afford to put the next structures in place to bring us to next level."