Former AltaVista channel manager sets sights on SiteScape

By Owen Ferguson


SiteScape acquired the AltaVista Forum groupware package from Compaq Computer five months ago. Now they've acquired someone to help market it to resellers  former AltaVista channel manager Richard Tahan.

Alexandria, Va.-based SiteScape Inc. hired Tahan as vice-president of its worldwide channel. The company is betting that Tahan's extensive experience with Alta-Vista, where he developed relationships with more than 600 resellers and distributors, will allow him to bring many former AltaVista VARs to SiteScape's doorstep.

SiteScape's primary product is the Forum groupware, "something that I call our electronic file cabinet," says Tahan. "What the SiteScape Forum does for the customer, from a data collaboration standpoint, is give people an opportunity to take documents and files in native format  a Word document, a Powerpoint document, an Excel spreadsheet  and store them up into a customized file cabinet that sits up on the Internet. Once it's up there, other members of that company will have access to that information immediately."

"The company that people like to compare us with the most, somewhat ironically, is Lotus," says Chip Vanters, SiteScape's executive vice-president of sales and marketing. "In fact, the Gartner Group told us that we were the poor man's Lotus Notes.

"We don't necessarily make that comparison . . . they're an enterprise-wide system, much more expensive than us, not as easy to use as us. We are totally Web- enabled, while they are struggling to get there," he adds. Tahan has big plans for this poor man's Notes in the Canadian market, and says he believes he has the experience and contacts to achieve them.

"Before joining SiteScape, I was director of channel marketing for AltaVista. It was my responsibility, from a worldwide perspective, to establish, recruit and develop the channel marketing program for Alta-Vista, and we had a very strong presence in Canada," he says.

"Conversations are now underway to develop local presence in Canada from a business presence, both from a sales perspective and for support," he continues. "What we're planning to do is have people in Canada who will be responsible for recruiting business partners that are based in Canada, because our primary sales model will be the channel."

Although he knows SiteScape has recently made sales to some large Canadian clients  the Canadian Standards Association and the Quebec Government, to name just two  Tahan is not yet sure exactly how many Canadian users he has. "We have approximately 2,500 customers worldwide, of which I would say half are North American," he admits.

But Tahan says he expects the Canadian market for the Forum software to increase, especially in Quebec.

"We'll be announcing a French-based forum product set, from a user interface perspective. The user interface will all be in French," says Tahan.

He adds that the company has versions of the product in Japanese and Spanish, and plans to release it in German and other languages.

"My major goal here, to be honest, is to get rich and retire," Tahan jokes. "But from a business point of view, it's my responsibility to identify the channel, to get enough channel partners out there on the streets so that they can adequately represent our product set to their customer base. Having localization of product, where I have a French-based product set and a Japanese-based product set, will make my job that much easier."

Both Tahan and Vanters say that all things considered, the product should have a bright future. "Collaboration, as a market, is projected to really explode here in the next three to four years, just because corporations are discovering that it's an excellent way to sort of glue their departments together, to create bonds between them and their suppliers," says Vanters. "It's creating an entirely new type of intellectual property."

He says companies are finding that the kinds of things and the knowledge that they can create using this kind of collaboration are incredibly valuable. "The word's getting around about that, so you're going to see a lot of this kind of stuff breaking out."



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