The channel has witnessed the exit of several key players recently, which indicates a shuffle in the ranks of some major Australian vendors. Today’s resignation of Graham Pullen, head of Asia Pacific for content management company Vignette, marks the third top level departure in a matter of weeks.
It follows the resignation of SAP chief Alan Hyde and two board members of Commander. Sun Microsystems, Quantum and Mincom are also recruiting new chief executives in Australia.
Working in the IT industry for over 33 years, Pullen did a brief stint at Vignette from 1999 to 2001 as national sales director. He returned to the company in 2005 as Asia Pacific general manager and vice president.
“After three years at Vignette, Graham Pullen has left the company to pursue other opportunities. We wish him well and thank him for his service. Vignette has begun a search for his replacement,” said Gayle Wiley, senior vice president of worldwide human resources, Vignette.
Pullen has previously held positions with PeopleSoft, Silicon Graphics and BEA Systems. In his role at Vignette he concentrated on lifting the performance of the content management vendor in APAC.
According to John Brand, research director, Hydrasight, growth in the content management space has been stunted by competition from open source web content management solutions such as Joomla, OpenCMS and Bricolage as well as other niche commercial and open source packages.
He also claimed, “organisations on the whole have scaled back their e-commerce and enterprise content management plans.”
In recent years, Vignette has directed its focus to web-based business process efficiency and enhanced collaboration. Brand believes the subdued reaction from the channel to the vendor’s offerings indicates that businesses were simply not ready to adopt the technology or were not convinced it would have considerable business benefits.
“We don’t expect them to lose those clients completely,” said Brand, adding that Vignette’s strong regional client base would sustain the company.