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USWeb/CKS on European buying spree

USWeb/CKS names a new head of worldwide business development and acquires services provider Case Consult.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
USWeb/CKS today named a new head of worldwide business development and continued its European buying spree with another acquisition.

The Santa Clara, California-based Web services and consulting firm today said it is acquiring services provider Case Consult, expanding its European workforce to more than 550 employees in eight countries. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Case Consult has more than 140 consultants in Belgium, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands with expertise in training, Internet application design and development, client/server technology, and data warehousing, the company said.

Case's partners include IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Sybase.

Through the deal, Case Consult's Chief Executive Officer Jan Picavet will become the USWeb/CKS executive partner in Europe, in charge of the company's entire European operations.

Meanwhile, USWeb/CKS has named Keith Schaefer, former executive partner of the Northwest region, head of the firm's worldwide business development.

Prior to joining USWeb/CKS, Schaefer cofounded Cybernautics, a Web site design, marketing, and content company that USWeb bought in 1997.

Schaefer helped build Cybernautics into a national new media company through deals with clients such as Turner Broadcasting, Viacom, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, Netscape Communications, and Intel.

Since 1997, USWeb/CKS has acquired more than 30 U.S.-based companies, most recently turning its eye toward European purchases.

In January, the company bought Sysicom, a French networking and computer security products integrator.