Open Market plays up S&P installation
The maker of content-management software says Standard & Poor's is using its flagship software to manage and deliver financial content to its large business clients.
With Open Market's content-server product, S&P was able to customize several of its financial resource Web sites in a matter of days, rather than months, according to Brian Whitehead, chief technology architect for S&P.
S&P, a division of McGraw-Hill, said that Open Market's software helped it customize content on sites including S&P Personal Wealth, S&P Market Insight and S&P Research Insight in six to seven days. On its older systems, S&P said customization took between two to three months.
The company, which plays strictly in the business-to-business sector, provides a wide range of financial information to brokerages, trading floors and many other financial institutions.
Burlington, Mass.-based Open Market, whose roots lie in selling enterprise software, began focusing on content-management and content-delivery software about a year and a half ago. Its family of content-server software grew out of its earlier acquisition of Future Tense, a maker of Web-based publishing tools and content-management applications.
Open Market, which competes against rivals Vignette and Interwoven in the content-management arena, also recently jumped into the growing business-to-business marketplace pool. The company last June unveiled Portal Now, a package of applications, consulting services and Web site hosting that targets companies that want to quickly create online marketplaces or portals.
Analysts have said in the past that Open Market lagged in its marketing efforts while noisier counterparts in the business-to-business world have gained further traction.
The S&P customer win "to us, illustrates the quality of our software and illustrates how companies are finding value in our software," said Joe Alwan, Open Market's senior vice president of worldwide marketing. Alwan, who added that Open Market currently has about 300 customers, said S&P is one of its largest clients to date.
The company's customer base includes a number of heavyweights in media, manufacturing and technology such as Bertelsmann, BASF, Acer, RealNetworks and Sony.