Although its revenue has dipped to $27 million, Wellington-based IT services company Fronde has squeaked out a full-year profit - thanks to a series of deals based around Salesforce.com and Google’s SaaS products, and Amazon’s cloud computing platform.

Fronde  squeaked out a $375,000 profit on turnover of $27 million for its full year to March 31 2009. The result indicates a trickier second half; for the six months to September 30 2008, the company had reported a $1 million profit.

In the year-ago period, Fronde had higher revenue - $31 million - but made a $2.9 million loss.

The company’s debt reduced from a year-ago $3.7 million to $300,000.

Chief executive Ian Clarke told NBR earlier this week, “We’ve made a modest profit but a fabulous turnaround.”

Part of the move out of the red came from old fashioned cost controls (headcount reduced from 200 to 170 over the year), reduced overheads and productivity gains.

But Mr Clarke says the main reason behind Fronde’s relatively buoyant result amid the recession was customers’ interest in the new-fangled area of SaaS (software-as-a-service - or software, and it’s data being stored on the internet rather than any one PC) and it’s close relative, cloud computing.

Fronde has been in the business of cloud computing - and integrating cloud, and non-cloud apps - for several years. In 2009, it's seen the technology move toward the mainstream.

Other recent highlights include venture capitalist, NZTE advisor and Power-by-Proxi boss Greg Cross joining Fronde’s board during April, and a major Filipino m-commerce deal struck by its Fronde Anywhere subsidiary.

In August last year, Fronde became Google’s “preferred” New Zealand enterprise software partner, and now receives a sales commission on the $US50 per user per year Premiere version of Google Apps.

So far, Google-generated business has been modest - Mr Clarke says Fronde has around 10 enterprise customers for Apps Premiere. “It’s an embryonic part of our business but we view it as very important in the future,” says Mr Clarke. “Everybody wants to understand how Google Apps can cut their costs”. Recently, Fronde pitched Google Apps’ remote coloration features as a way for employees to do more work from home as Swine flu lurks.

An Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform implementation has kept Fronde busy at one major account, and Mr Clarke sees a lot more business cloud computing coming up.

In the meantime, work related to Salesforce.com is keeping Fronde busiest (the US online CRM company has multiple NZ partners).

Mr Clarke says Transpower is a major client with a smart metering project. Overall, utilities and the public sector have featured large in Fronde’ revenue mix.

Government departments and utilities have bigger and longer standing programmes,” says Mr Clarke, helping Fronde skirt the impact of the recession.

However, even these sectors are starting to feel the pinch, says Mr Clarke.

“Some projects expected to start have not. Some have started with reduced budgets.”

Fronde’s results should be posted to Unlisted later today.