Savings seen in internet linkup

By ADAM GIFFORD

KPMG Consulting has formed an alliance with Microsoft to bring companies to the internet.

Phil Royal, KPMG Consulting New Zealand's head of solutions, said KPMG intended to recruit and train at least 30 staff this year for the KPMG Consulting Microsoft Dot.com practice.

The United States practice is hiring an additional 500 professionals and establishing an interactive laboratory to develop, test and showcase dot.com solutions. Mr Royal said KPMG was already working on two big projects.

Having a dedicated practice would allow greater speed and flexibility.

"The initiative will reduce start-up costs, which is a significant factor in the small New Zealand business environment. We offer preconfigured and reusable solutions that can be easily adapted," Mr Royal said.

KPMG Consulting is aggressively building up its internet capability. It recently bought web-developers The Web Limited and announced alliances with Cisco Systems and internet integrators Clearview Zivo.

"We are looking at several other initiatives to further our ability to provide end-to-end solutions," Mr Royal said.

The new practice offers strategy, branding, creative design, web technology integration, marketing and dot.com hosting services, delivered globally and locally.

Mr Royal said it made sense to align with Microsoft, particularly as the Windows 2000 system for corporate use would encourage greater use of the internet in business processes.

"Microsoft owns the desktop and the way the internet is going, whoever owns the desktop controls the entry point," he said.

He said the practice would draw on a lot of the Microsoft back-end tools, like Site Commerce Server, the SQL database and NT.

Mr Royal said many companies were looking to spin off "dot com" subsidiaries.

"The challenge for brick and mortar institutions with legacy systems is how to integrate into the new economy. A lot are setting up dot coms as standalone operations rather than trying to plug them back into their legacy systems."

He said high-tech companies and financial institutions were expected to be the early adopters.