Microsoft And KPMG Unveil Knowledge-Management Push

Microsoft and KPMG Consulting today took the wraps off a joint sales effort to deploy knowledge-management systems built on popular Windows applications.

The companies have a five-pronged plan to build collaborative software applications aimed at project management, customer analysis, merger and acquisitions, research and development, and supply-chain management. Using this strategy, the companies have engaged more than 100 accounts since the fall, says Trina Horner, Microsoft's global alliance manager for the KPMG Consulting relationship. While not all those engagements are closed sales, the effort illustrates Microsoft's push to bind its products in ways that serve demand for applications and let companies share data and collaborate on projects.

"You give them point solutions they're already familiar with," says John Hart, a managing director at KPMG, which combines its consulting and IT integration services with sales of Microsoft Office, Exchange, Project, SQL Server, Site Server, and other products. One key driver of the initiative: Office 2000's inclusion of the Visual Basic for Applications language makes it easier for companies to expose data through desktop applications than writing the script language required by previous versions of Office.

Contract sizes resulting from the knowledge-management initiative have ranged from $50,000 to $10 million, according to the companies.