An exploration and mining software solutions provider, with a spread of offices across the world, last week officially opened a new office in South Africa, which will be used as a base for the launch of a new suite of products into the continent.

Micromine CEO Kevin Fitzpatrick, on a stopover from Australia, told Mining Weekly in a video interview that steps were being taken to grow Africa’s share of the company’s overall global activity to well beyond the current 10%.

Fitzpatrick described Africa as “one of the engine rooms still available to us” and said that the company had found South Africa to be an “excellent” base from which to penetrate the African market.

“We’re very keen to have those products that we’ve successfully sold in this region distributed throughout the rest of the African continent, using South Africa as a base,” Fitzpatrick said.

The company sells the Micromine product range, which is a mining and exploration software solution, Geobank, which again linked back heavily into mining and exploration, and Pitram, a mine control and management software product.

“We’re really focused on the southern and western parts of the continent from South Africa and we see that we’re going to have significant impact into these regions,” Fitzpatrick added.

Micromine Africa regional manager Marc Ramsay told Mining Weekly that it was a “very exciting time” for the company, which was not only introducing new products like Geobank mobile and data management services products, but also adding a significant number of enhancements to its Micromine product range, the company’s stalwart performer.

“The world’s going mobile and tablets are becoming more prolific and we’re adjusting to that. We’re listening to the market and we’re bringing those things to the market in our true high-quality fashion,” Ramsay said.

The company serves both the big and small ends of the market, with a major South African manganese mine using its full range of products and new entrants having their hands held towards full operation.

He said there was no lack of mining entrepreneurship in South Africa, in particular, and with the changes to the awarding of exploration and mining rights, the company was seeing many small miners enter the fray.

“Our products are particularly tailored to those customers, firstly because we can scale the product very easily. You only pay for what you use, and also our products are very intuitive in their ease of use, so you don’t have to spend thousands and thousands of hours learning how to use the product.

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The products are actually developed to guide you through the process without affecting any of the outputs from the system,” Ramsay added.

Privately owned Micromine, which has 200 staff and 20 world offices, was founded 27 years ago by Graeme Tuder, who still heads the business.

Tuder and two programmers produced the first version of Micromine, which was released in 1986.

The company’s product ranges spread across the entire mining cycle from pre-exploration all the way through to mine management and the compilation of ore-reserves reports for listings on stock exchanges.

The latest Micromine 2013 release has 200 new features and 700 updates and the latest Geobank 2013 has an improved reporting module as well as a more powerful audit and validation trail.

“We continue to invest about 10% to 15% of our revenues back into product development,” Fitzpatrick added.