Consulting firm EDS and software maker Vignette Corp. Wednesday secured a
contract with aerospace and industrial product specialist Goodrich Corp. to
power its global intranet.
Financial terms of the contract were not made public. Specifically, EDS’
interactive agency, bluesphere, will use Vignette’s Content Management
Server to run the Goodrich intranet, which will serve 24,000 employees.
The play is the first significant move in an alliance inked between EDS
bluesphere and Vignette, which means simply that EDS will market and license
Vignette products to its clients around the world. Combining both services
and software, the firms plan on plowing ahead in what is a growing Web
content management market, one which research firm IDC said will reach $4.4
billion by 2004.
Indeed, in a recent research report IDC analyst Greg Dyer talked of the
importance of knowledge management, which is a key aspect of content
management that focuses on teaching firms how to dispense corporate
information coorectly and efficiently.
“Knowledge management is the new frontier for most companies,” said Greg
Dyer, senior research analyst for IDC’s Knowledge Management Services
program. “Corporate managers understand the benefit of capturing and sharing
intellectual capital, but they do not understand the process of putting it
into action. As a result, there is a great opportunity for vendors that can
develop and apply KM solutions around specific business problems that
clients are trying to solve…”
Goodrich said one of the reasons it chose Vignette’s applications was the
firm’s support for the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard, which are
key to the company’s Web strategy as it is with many software providers.
“Our corporate intranet site improves communication among Goodrich employees
by ensuring that the most up-to-date corporate information is readily
available at all times,” said Chuck McDevitt, director of IT Technical
Services at Goodrich Corp. “By partnering with EDS and Vignette, we have
been able to quickly implement a flexible intranet application that meets
our exact requirements.”
Vignette competes with IntraNet Solutions Inc., Interwoven Inc. and
Documentum Inc. in the content management space. To be sure, EDS is no
stranger to providing large organizations with intranets; the company joined
forces with Raytheon last October to service a global intranet to the Navy Marine Corps. that is good for about $5 billion over five years.
