Deloitte Consulting Chooses Open Text's Livelink for Collaboration and Knowledge Management

Business Wire, August 14, 2002

Business Editors

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 14, 2002

Open Text(TM) Corporation (Nasdaq:OTEX)(TSX:OTC), provider of Livelink(R), the leading collaboration and knowledge management software for the global enterprise, announced today that Deloitte Consulting, one of the world's leading consulting firms, has purchased and successfully installed Livelink(R) for its Melbourne, Australia outsourcing service center. Deloitte Consulting has deployed Livelink across its intranet, enabling collaboration between work groups at multiple sites associated with activities at the Melbourne service center. The initiative is intended to improve service to clients by enabling and encouraging the knowledge sharing, centralization, and workflows associated with projects and application support work undertaken by the service center. Through improved access to information, service center practitioners will be able to personalize content while capturing and synthesizing knowledge in real time across project teams.

Deloitte Consulting's Melbourne service center presently supports approximately 80 applications and executes around 90 concurrent projects on an ongoing basis. The service center has grown rapidly since Deloitte Consulting won the Telstra ERP Bundle Contract in March 2001. The organization's ability to capture, update, and track the necessary documentation is critical to meeting service level agreement targets and for effectively managing associated projects. Deloitte Consulting has set a goal to complete CMM(1) accreditation to Level 3 for the Melbourne service center. It expects the document management and process enhancement coming from Livelink to provide much of the process for complying with the model's requirements.

David Fothergill, director with Deloitte Consulting, said, "We required a solution that could marry strategy to technology, drive complex change rapidly, and consistently handle the sheer volume and scale of activity in the service center. We evaluated other vendors and found that Open Text met all our criteria for management of the knowledge chain while price and performance were competitive."

Livelink will provide Deloitte Consulting with a Web-based knowledge management infrastructure with rules-based workflow capability and automated document version control, enabling the organization to track service level agreement compliance. Livelink manages objects in addition to documents, incorporates automated archiving and storage of documents, and includes an interface to an e-mail facility. Users will have ready access to online reference documents and will benefit from increased management provided by document version control as well as full text search.

Deloitte Consulting's outsourcing service line in Australia and New Zealand has service centers in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Petone (near Wellington) in New Zealand, which presently service approximately 50 clients. The Telstra contract is the largest account, a five-year application maintenance and development outsourcing contract that started in March 2001. The needs of this contract were a prime focus for the software selection team. Livelink will support a diversity of skill sets and functions that Deloitte Consulting handles for Telstra including a payroll system for around 45,000 employees; corporate data warehousing systems; and a range of mini-applications for budgeting, financial, and legal purposes.

"By choosing Livelink for the Melbourne service center, Deloitte Consulting has recognized the ROI that our collaboration and knowledge management software will provide," says John Shackleton, Open Text president. "Livelink's open architecture offers a framework to bring together collaborative interactions, business processes, and applications that allow Deloitte Consulting to provide a single point of access to both content and other mission-critical business information used in this large service center."

Through its open architecture, Livelink will integrate project management software from Primavera, a leading provider of comprehensive project management, control, and execution software, and Siebel 7, the latest release of Siebel eBusiness Applications from Siebel Systems, the world's leading provider of eBusiness applications software, for customer relationship management. This integrated Livelink-based application will give Deloitte Consulting a comprehensive capability to be able to satisfy the requirements of the Software Engineering Institute's CMM, which requires a high degree of consistency in methods in place in an organization. "Livelink will undoubtedly standardize the way we conduct our business, replacing disparate islands of knowledge with a comprehensive collaboration and knowledge management solution. Its ability to scale and handle our diversity of applications in our operation was critical to Livelink being selected as our platform of choice," Mr Fothergill added.

About Livelink

Livelink is the leader in collaboration and knowledge management for the global enterprise. Its richly-featured enterprise services include virtual team collaboration, business process automation, enterprise group scheduling and information retrieval services, all tightly integrated into a solution that is easily customized and extended. Livelink is essential to the effective management and development of communities of interest that span organizations and industries. For everything from the creation of complex e-community relationships to the automation of simple e-business processes, Livelink delivers true dynamic collaboration between individuals, organizations and large trading communities. Livelink servers are fully Web-based and open-architected to ensure rapid deployment and easy access to its full functionality through a standard Web browser. For more information, visit www.opentext.com/livelink/