Vivendi Consolidating U.S. Internet OperationsVivendi Consolidating U.S. Internet Operations

Vivendi Universal plans to consolidate all of its U.S. music, gaming, and education Web properties under a single umbrella, supported by a common back-end IT infrastructure and an overarching management team. The newly formed Vivendi Universal Net USA Group Inc. will have oversight of such common online brands as MP3.com, EMusic.com, RollingStone.com, Iwin, Virtual Vegas, and Education.com. Vivendi estimates the combined audience of the Net USA Group sites at 36.5 million unique monthly visitors.

Robin Richards, who had been president of MP3.com before Vivendi acquired it earlier this year for $372 million, has been tapped as CEO of the new unit and will report directly to Philippe Germond, CEO of Vivendi's worldwide Web unit, Vivendi Universal Net. Richards says Vivendi execs have made clear their desire to have a single network that connects to a universe of devices, and he says the creation of Net USA Group will take the company a step closer to that vision. "We've got all the properties; now they just need to be put together," he says.

During the next several months, Richards says, Net USA Group will centralize hosting, E-mail, publishing, customer service, and human resources using unspecified technologies he says must be "protected, but consumer-friendly." The new infrastructure, which he says will be in place by the end of March, will enable the disparate sites to operate more like a single entity. "It's going to give us a lot better information, and it's going to give advertisers a much larger audience to promote to," Richards says.

Gartner analyst Rob Batchelder says Vivendi is following in the footsteps of AOL Time Warner and that its move to develop a common IT infrastructure not only makes sense, it's a necessity. Batchelder says that to combat the threat posed by peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, entertainment companies must deliver the kind of personalized customer service that's made possible by companywide access to customer data. Sharing that information across its properties, he says, will let Vivendi view each customer as a long-term transaction stream rather than a one-time sale. "They're realizing that information is one of their most important assets," Batchelder says. "Every entertainment company has to be looking at that."