Alliance & Leicester Turns to Percussion’s Rhythmyx ECM to Develop Its Second Generation Intranet

London, UK - 6 September 2005 - Percussion Software today announced that FTSE 100 company, Alliance & Leicester, has selected its Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system as a key part of its intranet upgrade ambitions. Rhythmyx will bring further cost savings and process efficiencies to Alliance & Leicester allowing it to better manage its intranet content, which is actively used by 9,000 staff throughout the company’s head office, its 250 regional branches and seven UK-based call centres.

The financial services sector is one of the fastest moving market sectors and access to accurate information is crucial to maintaining competitive advantage and efficient work practice. The upgrade of the intranet, which was originally developed in July 2000, will ensure that Alliance & Leicester staff can use a broader range of information, including the most up-to-date product and sales data, internal business materials and HR and benefits information.

Audrey Philbrooks, group intranet manager at Alliance & Leicester comments: “The main emphasis of our investment is to improve the quality and timeliness of the information distributed across our business. We want our people to feel informed and, as a result, be able to give an informed service to our customers. The enhancements to the intranet will allow us to develop better control mechanisms to support the way we create and distribute our corporate information. This is vital in a regulated environment.”

As well as the regional branches, Alliance & Leicester operates seven public facing call centres. The ability to provide advisors with accurate and up-to-date product and service information is crucial to maintaining customer service and handling large call volumes in an effective way. The Intranet upgrade provides the Group with the opportunity to restructure and redesign the online information used by advisors. Advisors will also be given access to a wider range of bespoke tools, such as online calculators and directories, that have been developed as part of the intranet upgrade.

Rhythmyx is a robust enterprise content management solution that manages Web content, documents, digital assets, portal content and scanned images. The solution offers rich functionality ‘out-of-the-box,’ allowing customisation to be focused on meeting specific needs, and easy, ongoing administration by the Group Intranet Team. By delivering a range of pre-built application functionality through Rhythmyx FastForward for Web Content Management (WCM), Rhythmyx allows organisations to implement the functionality they need today whilst ensuring that they can meet tomorrow's needs with an extensible, standards-based architecture.

David Churchill, technology strategy & architecture manager at Alliance & Leicester says: “The content authoring process within Rhythmyx provides automation of non-productive tasks such as workflow and link checking, which in the past were extremely labour intensive. We will be able to remove the day-to-day administration of the intranet from the IT department enabling the Group to place a greater focus on the publication of content. One of the other key reasons for choosing Percussion was Rhythmyx’s ease of implementation and the minimal disruption to our business coupled with Percussion’s reputation in working with other organisations in our sector.”

Rhythmyx offers Alliance & Leicester an out-of-the-box content management solution enabling it to streamline the content authorisation processes through Rhythmyx’s audit trails and workflow capabilities. The software’s De-Coupled Delivery architecture, which separates the management of content from the content delivery environment, will allow Alliance & Leicester to reuse content and publish to multiple channels, without incurring any incremental licensing costs.

Audrey Philbrooks continues: “Rhythmyx allows us to automate many of the processes involved in creating and maintaining intranet content. Our people are now able to contribute to the intranet in the knowledge that their content is being produced in accordance with our best practice guidelines. We are also considering re-using the intranet content on other channels including plasma screen displays within our head office, regional call centres and branches. Rhythmyx’s De-Coupled Delivery ensures any publishing costs will be kept to a minimum.”

Joseph Wykes, managing director European operations, Percussion Software adds: “This deal clearly demonstrates Rhythmyx’s ability to underpin a heavily used, multipurpose corporate intranet that serves both as a powerful communications tool for employees as well as a support for business and customer processes. Our work with Alliance & Leicester is giving rise to a great deal of interest from other financial services companies which demand accurate information that can be shared immediately across the organisation.”

About Alliance & Leicester

Alliance & Leicester is one of the UK's major financial services groups, offering a broad range of financial services to both personal and commercial customers. It has been a part of the FTSE 100 index of leading shares since 1997, when it converted from its original mutual building society status. Today, it has 5.5 million customers, 254 branches, and underwrites £28bn of residential mortgage balances, and £3.1bn of unsecured personal loan balances.