BroadVision makes its move in e-content
BroadVision makes its move in e-content
BroadVision has set up an Australian office just as it has announced that it will acquire one of the traditional document management vendors, Interleaf.
Jim Hickman has been transferred from the company's California headquarters to become managing director of the new Sydney-based Australia/New Zealand arm of the company. BroadVision's One to One suite of knowledge management, financial and electronic commerce software is the first to combine these functions into a single offering.
"Our goal is to dominate the enterprise class e-commerce space in a short period of time," said Mr Hickman.
"Users will now have a single source for an end to end solution."
One to One is one of the more ambitious attempts to tackle the problem of integrating the Internet as a sales tool alongside more traditional channels.
The software extends from so-called "customer-facing" functions like customer relationship management through to internal process-driven applications like workflow.
"The Web brings new challenges. The businesses that take that challenge and adapt are going to be the ones which succeed," said Mr Hickman.
The only previous presence BroadVision had had in Australia was through Perth-based Xpedior, and Melbourne-based Sausage Software.
Sausage managed to land Telstra and the ANZ Bank as clients during 1999. Telstra is still trialing One to One, over a year after it first installed the software.
BroadVision has also signed up several new implementation partners: PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, KPMG, Arthur Andersen and Cambridge Technology Partners.
TWO DOT COMS
The company's heritage both here and in the US has been massive instalments in very large companies - the average implementation cost of the full suite is $750,000.
However, Mr Hickman said the company was prepared to be flexible on licensing costs, and it was already close to signing up two small "dot com" companies in Australia.
"We're not going to neglect the dot coms," he said. "In California, they are a major part of our business, because they are innovative in terms of the implementation agility of their business processes."
BroadVision announced in late January that it would acquire Interleaf in a cash and stock transaction which valued Interleaf at $1.37 billion.
Interleaf had been reinvigorated late last year with new products called BladeRunner and X-WAP, based around the Extensible Markup Language and Wireless Application Protocol respectively, which were developed under a new division called the e-content company (see November/December 1999, page 81).
"With the product set that we have, BroadVision will continue to sell and deliver. Users will now have a single source for an end to end solution," said Gerry Tucker, Australian MD of the e-content company.
An interview with BroadVision CEO Pehong Chen appears on page 46 of this issue.