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ENTERPRISE content management company Vignette is on the hunt for a new Asia-Pacific head following the sudden departure of Graham Pullen. Mr Pullen has been in the IT industry for over 33 years, including an initial two years at Vignette as national sales director before leaving in 2001.
In 2002 he joined Documentum as managing director of Australia and New Zealand.
The following year storage giant EMC acquired Documentum.
Mr Pullen spent less than 24 months under the new EMC management before returning to Vignette in early 2005 as Asia-Pacific general manager and vice-president.
A Vignette spokesperson confirmed his tenure had ended.
“After three years at Vignette, Graham Pullen has left the company to pursue other opportunities. We wish him well and thank him for his service. Vignette has begun a search for his replacement," Gayle Wiley, Vignette senior vice president of worldwide human resources, said. In the interim, Craig Broadbent, head of professional services, will take over Mr Pullen's portfolio. Mr Pullen previously had stints with PeopleSoft, Silicon Graphics and BEA Systems.
Vignette has been struggling to reinvent itself and stave off increasing competition from incumbent and new players.
John Brand, research director at Hydrasight, said Vignette and most of the other major content management vendors have had a tough time of late because of two main issues.
"There's the competition from open source web content management solutions such as Joomla, OpenCMS, Bricolage, and around 50 to 100 other niche commercial and open source packages.
"Also, organisations on the whole have scaled back their e-commerce and enterprise content management plans," Mr Brand said.
While having developed and acquired some good technology, Vignette has tried to promote web-based business process efficiency and enhanced collaboration to an audience that was either not entirely ready to adopt it, or not convinced that it would have considerable business benefits, he added.
Despite the competition, Vignette's strong regional client base should see them through. "We don’t expect them to lose those clients completely," Mr Brand said.
Globally, third quarter revenue in 2007 was $US43.5 million, a 11.7 per cent decrease compared with the same period in 2006. Fourth quarter results will be announced tonight.
Mr Pullen's exit comes days after SAP lost its local chief Alan Hyde. Sun Microsystems, Quantum and Mincom are also recruiting new chief executives in Australia. By Fran Foo Original Article Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts) |
