WDG adds another piece to Web services puzzle
WDG adds another piece to Web services puzzle
Australian Web services company WDG (Web Development Group) has added what it considers an important part in its ongoing strategic development by securing an exclusive Australian distribution deal with UK knowledge management company Infogistics.
"Any strategy is made up of different pieces like a puzzle and we see this agreement as an important piece of the puzzle for our long term strategy," says Arthur Spanos, managing director of WDG. "If you look at the growth in Web development services in the enterprise, one of the bottlenecks is the whole argument surrounding ROI (return on investment), so the more useful you make anything, the more compelling the ROI case becomes, so the importance of this partnership is in the context of where it sits in the broader services that we deliver."
The first product from the Edinburgh-based company to be released in Australia is RealTerm. Incorporating advances in natural language processing, RealTerm is a powerful new technology which combines the flexibility of a query-based search with guided browsing capabilities of directories. RealTerm is different from other search solutions in that search topics are created in real time. This can cut the time spent searching by 40 per cent by delivering more intuitive and accurate search results.
The addition of Infogistics portfolio to WDG's service offerings presents WDG with an opportunity on two fronts, as Spanos explains.
"It's an opportunity for us to introduce more services to our existing customers. Additionally, it gives us a point of entry into other organisations that haven't used us in the past, for as well as providing a key piece of technology of relevance to them, it allows us to introduce them to WDG and the range of services that we offer to organisations that might not otherwise have been dealing with us."
Spanos considers Infogistics' products to be suited to pretty much any type of organisation with large amounts of information to store, such as the media, the legal sector, government departments and human resources, and expects the distribution deal to unlock the door to all of those vertical markets.
"In the past, the majority of our business has come from medium to large organisations, but now that a lot of those types of businesses are in a cycle of cost reduction and rationalisation, a lot of organisations that would normally outsource are bringing things in-house again, while others that are continuing with an outsourcing model are still looking at ways to reduce their overall spend, so from our perspective, in order to maintain the growth we've had in the last seven years we have had to look at other sectors."
Of greatest interest to WDG is the previously largely untapped – but potentially very lucrative – area of Government.
"We've not really focused on that area as we were getting so much work from other sectors, but given the changing nature of the IT services industry as a whole, we are focusing a little more on not trying to capture everything we can out of that sector but instead being selective and opportunistic about the types of engagements we decide to pursue."
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