Vivant's Service Helps Firms Target IT Contractors

Vivant Corp. today will launch Vivant.com, a Web servicedesigned to help companies hire and manage contracted IT professionals. Vivant.com's two main audiences--companies searching for contractors and staffing firms looking to promote their contractors--pay $10,000 for a quarterly Enterprise-class subscription to the portal service, with additional charges assessed based upon the number of contractors Vivant will help manage. A more customized subscription program, Enterprise-Plus, generally costs almost half again as much.

While most companies have existing relationships with staffing firms, Vivant.com adds value to these relationships by cutting down the amount of time companies spend searching for candidates and providing online access to contractor information in real time, says David McKay, VP of marketing for Vivant.

"When we began looking at this market space, it was immediately obvious that there was a significant need for process automation that allowed the whole IT contractor workforce to be sourced, deployed, and tracked much more effectively," says Cindy Padnos, founder and CEO of Vivant. "Strategic use of IT contractors will be a key driver of a company's competitive strength as demand for scarce skill sets flourishes."

Gartner Group predicts that by 2003 60% of large enterprises will use contract workers to fulfill more than half of their IT activities, driven by factors such as the growth of E- commerce, the extension of business supply-chain systems, and the continuing rise in the number of remote users.