Ricardo, one of the world's leading independent engineering firms, has won two top awards for its use of the web.

The Shoreham-based company, working with global information and communications technology services group CMG, has won the Intranet/Extranet Project Award and the Knowledge Management Project Award at the prestigious Information Management Awards.

A panel of high-profile independent experts from different fields, including journalism, consultancy, academia and user associations, judged R-Link to demonstrate the most innovative and successful use of web technology for managing corporate information.

The judges were part-icularly impressed by R-Link for the way it delivered significant and definable benefits to Ricardo and its customers.

Ricardo IT director Chris Bates said: "The success of Ricardo is founded on its high calibre people and their in-depth engineering expertise.

"R-Link's easy access and unique cap-ability provides a valuable tool for the 1,400 highly trained Ricardo engineers and technicians located across the world to communicate, collaborate and importantly share up-to-date information to provide our customers with innovative solutions.

"CMG took the trouble to fully explore the business requirements and objectives of Ricardo.

"R-Link provides a robust, user friendly and flexible system that allows us to mobilise more than 80 years' of engineering knowledge, enabling us to offer our clients high value customer services creating a unique competitive advantage for Ricardo."