After the announcement about Tanguy Peers moving to San Diego to join eBay’s top management, here’s another Belgian making a big promotion in tech world. This time it’s AT&T’s Tom Regent who has been appointed to head the company’s EMEA activities.

After various career shifts within the company, his last one as Global Head of Marketing, Tom will now be coordinating AT&T EMEA (Europe, Middle-East and Africa) from the American telecom giant’s London offices. AT&T employs over 3 000 people in 31 countries in the EMEA region alone, and operates 6 major internet data centers.

(Via Yahoo! Finance)

De Tijd reports (link in Dutch) on an agreement between Porthus and Seagha about the acquisition of the latter by the former.

The OnDemands IT solutions provider has agreed to acquire Seagha’s activities with respect to electronic data transmission for a total consideration on a cash free basis of € 3.85 million in cash. From the press release:

Seagha is an important player and has built an established name in electronic integration, development of software applications and consulting services in the logistics industry. With the acquisition of the Seagha activities, Porthus will expand and strengthen its position in the high growth market of electronic customs solutions. As a result of this acquisition, Porthus will cover over 80% of all electronic customs declarations currently submitted in Belgium. Porthus will gain an installed base of nearly 500 customers, of which many large international organizations.

Seagha and the majority of its customers are located at the Port of Antwerp. As Europe’s second largest port for volume transport, Antwerp is a strategic location which has become key for all European import and export trade activities.

Porthus (Alternext: ALPTH) will adjust its business objectives to reflect Seagha’s contribution. An outlook for fiscal year 2008 will be provided during Porthus’s full year earnings release on September 17, 2007.

(Note: I’m an advisor to this company but have no financial interests)

ContactOffice has just launched a public beta of its Web Office suite. While there was already a public beta for early testers available since March 2007, not all of the functionalities of the service had been migrated to the new platform up until now. The release comes just in time for the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, where ContactOffice is one of the sponsors. Patrick De Schutter, founder and Managing Director of the company, will be there to present the beta release and to explore potential US partnerships as well as a local sales office. Blognation will be there too.

The new version runs on AJAX and was developed with Google Web Toolkit. There are still some improvements to be done before all existing accounts will be migrated to the new platform, but apart from the task list the developers have managed to get the complete set of features up and running. You can test-drive the new beta here.

ContactOffice was one of the first web-based collaboration & communication tools for businesses. The service centralizes online management of essential business tools like messaging (e-mail, SMS, fax,chat, Skype, etc.), calendaring, contact management, document sharing, bookmarks, notes, forums, wikis, and so on. There’s the usual free and paid packages, but one of the key selling points of ContactOffice is that it also comes in a white-label version which allows organizations to create a customized platform. The service is currently available in English, French, Spanish and Dutch.

Obviously, the company is up to some stiff competition in the Web Office space, not only from Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live, but also from dedicated movers like Zoho, Zimbra and ThinkFree.

ContactOffice was founded in 1999 by the current management team (Patrick De Schutter, Arnaud Huret, Luc Claes and Brice Le Blévennec) and has been able to fund its own growth apart from a small initial capital investment by Groupe Josi back in 2001. The company has been profitable since 2003, and now counts about 350 000 end users (of which 100 000 use the free version). Customers and partners include a number of renowned French schools and universities, and organizations like Mobistar, Electrabel, TNT, Office.com and Suez.

The company will now focus on expanding its customer base by developing its reseller and affiliate channel and by tapping into other regions and language zones, while adding more features to become a fully-fledged virtual office (with text, spreadsheet and presentation processors). The management team is actively looking for external investment to fund its further growth.