Hummingbird Ltd. - Content Management Systems -  Category Directory

(416) 496-2200

1 Sparks Avenue
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M2H 2W1
www.hummingbird.com

Hummingbird USA Inc.
(650) 917-7300

480 San Antonio Road
Suite 100
Mountain View, California 94040

Sales

$192.6 million

Business Description 

The Company is a leading global provider of enterprise software solutions. The
Company's enterprise content management (enterprise content management) solutions fall into two principal
product families: (i) Hummingbird Enterprise (formerly known as Enterprise
Information Portal Solutions), and (ii) Hummingbird Connectivity (formerly
known as Host Access and Network Connectivity). The Company's flagship
offering, Hummingbird Enterprise, is an integrated suite of software
applications that allows users to extract both structured and unstructured data
from disparate corporate locations to capture, create, access, share, find,
analyze, protect and publish data, and efficiently manage all consent from a
single point of access and administration. Hummingbird Connectivity is the
Company's market leading host access product suite that includes software
applications for accessing mission-critical back office applications and
related data from the majority of today's systems, including mainframe, AS/400,
Linux and UNIX platform environments.
 

The Company solutions enable users o address critical business needs, such as

information management, businesscontinuity, disaster recovery, compliance and

risk management. The Company solutions are designed as modular applications that

are fully interoperable with each other, enabling its customers to incrementally build an enterprise
content management solution to meet their evolving information needs in a cost
effective manner. The Company ECM solution is rooted in document management,
offering integrated capabilities in records management, knowledge management,
collaboration, data integration and business intelligence, among others.

Hummingbird Connectivity is the Company's market leading host access product
suite that includes software applications for accessing mission-critical back
office applications and related data from the majority of today's systems,
including mainframe, AS/400, Linux and UNIX platform environments.

The Company's products are sold and supported in over fifty countries around
the world. The Company sells its products directly to customers and indirectly
through distributors, value-added resellers, systems integrators and original
equipment manufacturers. The Company's products are used in a wide range of
industries, including legal, central, state/provincial and federal government,
aerospace/defense, manufacturing, automotive, petrochemical, banking and
financial services, telecommunications, utilities, pharmaceutical and
education. Some of the Company's major customers include AT&T, Amec Group Ltd.,
AXA Group Baker & McKenzie, Barclays Bank Plc, Boeing, British Telecom, Daimler
Chrysler, General Electric, Hydro Quebec, Inco, Norfolk Southern Rail
Technologies, Nokia, Morgan Stanley, Motorola, the Port of Seattle, Proctor and
Gamble, Public Works & Government Services Canada, Saatchi & Saatchi, Telecom
Italia, United States Internal Revenue Service, Wells Fargo and Viacom. In
fiscal 2003 the Company generated revenues of $192.6 million, with no single
end-user customer accounting for more than 2.0% of total revenues.

Products

Hummingbird Enterprise

Hummingbird Enterprise is an integrated enterprise content management platform
that enables organizations to unlock the value of business content and provides
the foundation for building process-centric enterprise content management
solutions. It provides a comprehensive framework for content life cycle
management with the ability to systematically capture, create, access, manage,
share, find, analyze, protect and publish data based on processes and rules
defined by the organization.

Several key features of Hummingbird Enterprise are:

Content Management. Hummingbird Enterprise delivers a comprehensive platform
that allows users to harness and manage content, thereby enabling them to
leverage their organization's knowledge assets. Effectively managing the
various types of electronic documents relied upon by organizations, including
e-mail, multimedia, paper, forms, and records, requires a secure, flexible
environment that enables users to easily catalog, find, and share information.
Hummingbird Enterprise provides such an environment.

Shared Repository. Hummingbird Enterprise provides a repository for storing
business content, such as documents, electronic records, e-mail, Web content,
instant messaging threads, or reports.

Strong Security. Hummingbird Enterprise provides extensive security features,
including internal and external user authentication. Administrators can
configure role-based groups with granular permissions that control who can
create, search for, and manage content, allow or deny access to documents and
assign retention and disposition rules to documents.

E-mail Management. Hummingbird Enterprise provides automated rules-based e-mail
management capability which helps companies comply with regulations mandating
the retention of e-mail as records, since both incoming and outgoing e-mail
messages and attachments are captured, profiled, categorized and stored within
the shared repository.

Records Management. Hummingbird Enterprise includes a records management
feature that enables the automatic creation, retention and final disposition of
records at any stage of the content lifecycle, thereby enabling long-term
access, audit and retention control of all content in compliance with various
regulatory requirements.

Knowledge Management. Hummingbird Enterprise allows users to manage and
categorize content, thereby facilitating the convenient navigation and display
of relevant content in the appropriate context. It also allows users to conduct
single, unified searches across multiple information sources, including Lotus
Notes, Microsoft Exchange Server, Web sites, file repositories, document
management systems, multimedia libraries, databases, and enterprise
applications.

Architecture. Hummingbird Enterprise is based on a scalable high performance
Web-based architecture that supports full life cycle content management. It is
designed around a multi-tiered platform, with the following four layers:

o the access layer, which supports a wide range of client interfaces
that encompass Webtop, MS Outlook, MS Explorer and MS Office, Mobile
devices and third-party Portal frameworks

o the transaction services layer, which houses the metadata,
permissions, security and business rules associated with the
management, sharing and publishing of content

o the Web-server layer, which provides Web application access to
Hummingbird Enterprise

o the application programming interfaces (APIs) that provide a formal
framework for customization and application integration

DOCS Open

DOCS Open is the Company's legacy two-tier client server based document
management offering. It provides a robust document management repository,
document routing, imaging and records management capabilities. The Company's
DOCS Open installed base of customers provides a continuous source of high
margin maintenance renewal revenue. The Company also markets Hummingbird
Enterprise to its DOCS Open customers as a product upgrade.

Hummingbird Connectivity

Hummingbird Connectivity seamlessly delivers enterprise mission critical data
to the user desktop and is designed to bridge the gap between legacy systems
and enterprise users by delivering the quickest, easiest and most secure single
point of access to UNIX systems, mainframe and AS/400s.

Exceed is the most secure and popular PC X server in the market. It allows
users to cost-effectively connect the powerful Microsoft Windows desktops to a
wide variety of X Window enabled servers, and access high-end X applications.

HostExplorer provides high-speed desktop connectivity to enterprise hosts,
including IBM Mainframe, AS/400 and UNIX systems. HostExplorer delivers a
variety of terminal model types and runs with Windows NT/XP and Windows
95/98/2000 operating systems across corporate intranets and the Internet.

The Company's NFS Maestro line provides file and print services solutions for
mixed PC and UNIX environments. This technology allows users to access remote
data in a familiar graphical Windows environment without having to understand
UNIX, NFS commands or underlying network complexities. The NFS client provides
quick access to file and print services on any NFS server throughout the
network. In addition, the NFS client includes a suite of TCP/IP client
applications that provide networking functions. The NFS server applications
make local operating system resources available to other NFS clients throughout
the enterprise.

Exceed onDemand permits remote users to access back office applications,
providing the full range of PC X Server functionality in an ultra-thin,
two-tiered application that can be accessed through dial-up connections. Exceed
onDemand is extremely light and fast, and delivers seamless, reliable, secure,
flexible, robust and cost-effective access from remote locations to the many
types of computing platforms in an enterprise, including UNIX, Linux,
VMS, X Windows and IBM mainframes.

Professional Services and Training

The Company's professional services group, forms a critical component its
integrated solution offering. This group is dedicated to helping customers and
partners derive greater value from the Company solutions in a timely fashion,
thus maximizing the return they can generate on their technology investment. In
addition to providing comprehensive, ongoing training courses, the Company's
professional services group offers a wide range of customer services including:
mix-and match programming services (integrating the Company's products into
existing corporate applications), building data models and reports and
analyzing data and building data sources using the Company's analysis tools. By
providing a wealth of expertise in all aspects of the Company's technologies,
the professional services group is able to offer customers guidance through
every stage of implementing the Company's products.

Service and Support

The Company provides customers with support via telephone and email access to
the Company's technical support staff. In addition, technical support staff
often makes on-site visits to customers. The Company's technical support
engineers not only provide assistance in diagnosing problems, but also work
closely with customers to address system integration issues and to assist in
increasing the efficiency and productivity of their systems. The Company
maintains in-house hardware platforms and host applications from numerous
vendors, in order to permit compatibility testing during product development
and replication of customer problems to assist in customer support. In
addition, to be able to provide better global support to all of its customers,
the Company offers local technical support from its European offices.

The Company generally provides a 90-day service warranty for its products. To
encourage customer upgrades, the Company notifies registered customers of new
releases and offer upgrades at a discount to the suggested list price of the
product. The Company seeks to incorporate into its products features and
functionality that are responsive to customer needs, including an easy to use
installation facility and over-the-network installation and upgrade capability.
Larger sales are site licenses under which customers may purchase an annual
maintenance program, which entitles them to an automatic upgrade upon shipment
of a new release.

The Company believes that its experience in solving customer problems together
with the technical expertise of its support personnel, combine to differentiate
us from its competitors and constitute a competitive advantage.

Enterprise Content Management Industry Background

Information is among the most valuable assets of any organization. An
organization's ability to efficiently manage and utilize the vast quantities of
data generated through everyday processes, transactions and events can create a
competitive advantage. However, the rapid growth of unstructured data has
resulted in disparate repositories of data throughout organizations.

By effectively combining the many disparate systems across an enterprise,
enterprise content management solutions allow users the ability to capture,
create, access, manage, share, find, analyze, protect and publish data,
enabling users to make better, more informed business decisions. In an effort
to automate and streamline the management of data, organizations have sought
the complimentary functionality provided by collaboration, knowledge
management, records management, business intelligence applications and portal,
thereby creating the need for solutions that can integrate these
functionalities in a unified, seamless platform. Unlike standalone
applications, unified and integrated enterprise content management solutions enable organizations to
lower their cost of deployment and administration. The seamless
interconnectivity, rapid deployment and high return on investment that these
integrated solutions can provide have also driven organizations to make
enterprise content management an important element of their overall business
strategies.

Corporate scandals, threats of terrorism, and increasingly stringent reporting
requirements have created an immediate need for solutions that help
organizations to comply with new regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of
2002 as well as other regulations that require corporate control over internal
resources. These new rules have driven substantial growth in enterprise content
management solutions, as organizations are required to manage data in a manner
that allows them to meet regulatory requirements.

Giga Research, a wholly owned subsidiary of Forrester Research, Inc. estimates
that the enterprise content management market segment will grow from $1.5
billion in 2002 to $3.3 billion in 2006, representing a compound annual growth
rate of 22.4%.

The Company anticipated a trend towards customer demand for an integrated enterprise content management
offering, and expects to continue to capitalize on this trend by providing
integrated enterprise software solutions. The Company was the first to market
with an integrated suite of content management applications branded as
Hummingbird Enterprise. This suite is designed to support end-to-end content
life cycle management that includes capturing, creating, accessing, managing,
sharing, finding, analyzing, protecting and publishing content as part of an
integrated process.

Document Management (DM)

Structured data, such as sales records, inventory data or accounting and
billing information, is typically stored in tables in traditional database
management systems. Unstructured data, such as word processing, spreadsheet,
CAD drawings, image, graphics and multimedia files, is produced by a myriad of
desktop and professional applications. Unstructured data typically exists in
hard copy as well as in a multitude of electronic data types and file formats,
and is believed to comprise approximately 80% of the content in the average
enterprise. In a typical corporate environment, unstructured electronic
documents are created, modified, distributed and stored using multiple software
systems which run on a variety of different platforms that may be
geographically dispersed, with little compatibility or data sharing capability
between systems.

Over the last 10 years, the Internet has emerged as an increasingly important
medium for business. Internet technologies are having a significant influence
on the configuration of network computing environments as organizations are
increasingly adopting private "intranets" and "extranets", based on Internet
data formats and communications technologies to connect geographically
dispersed networks and information repositories and communicate with customers
and partners 24x7 from anywhere in the world.

The proliferation of relational database management systems (RDBMS) enabled the
effective management of much of the structured data within large organizations.
However, these systems are not designed to manage the complexity and variety of
unstructured data. As a result, individuals are spending a disproportionate
amount of their time locating, assembling, processing and duplicating data
rather than engaging in more productive activities. In addition, today's PC
users often work in collaborative teams that are geographically dispersed,
creating additional opportunities for errors to occur.

Enterprise Document Management (EDM) technologies emerged in order to resolve
these problems. EDM systems provide a means to store, easily locate and
retrieve document-based information throughout the document lifecycle. An
effective document management system must be able to operate in a heterogeneous
computing environment, permit users to collaborate and contribute information
across enterprise and geographic boundaries and be flexible enough to adapt to
emerging hardware and software platforms, including the Internet and intranets.
In addition, the ability to create libraries for secure document access and
retrieval based on a variety of criteria, to maintain a record of user activity
and to control multiple document versions is essential. While a number of
technology suppliers have developed proprietary software systems to address
these challenges, many of these solutions serve only single applications (for
example, word processing) and individual environments (for example, a single
network operating system) and therefore do not address enterprise-wide
concerns. Over the last couple of years the enterprise document management
technologies became part of the broader enterprise content management (enterprise content management)
market.

Enterprise Content Management (enterprise content management) technologies extend the management of
documents to include any type of content, from scanned invoices, email,
presentations, and collaboration projects to video and instant messaging.

Acquired through the purchase of PC DOCS Group International, Inc. in 1999, the
Company's document management technology was formerly known as the DOCS family
of products, including DOCS Open, CyberDOCS, PowerDOCS, and DOCSFusion. This
product family was renamed Hummingbird DM as part of a comprehensive
re-branding initiative undertaken by the Company in February 2002.

Hummingbird DM facilitates the capture, management, sharing, and protection of
corporate content resources. User queries are easily executed across global DM
repositories, enabling users to find and control documents and easily
distribute them for review, collaboration, and publication with project teams
inside and outside the traditional corporate landscape. From electronic
documents, e-mails, and multimedia to paper, forms, and records, the complex
variety of digital file types demands a secure, flexible environment that
enables users to easily catalog, find, and share information - a demand met by
Hummingbird DM.
 
Hummingbird DM companion solutions provide imaging, workflow, Web publishing,
and engineering file management capabilities, seamlessly integrated into
Hummingbird Document and Records Management interfaces to increase productivity
and enhance workgroup cooperation. Hummingbird DM Extension for AutoCAD
provides a link between AutoCAD and Hummingbird DM, allowing organizations to
manage engineering drawings while strategically incorporating them into
enterprise content repositories. Hummingbird DM WorkFlow delivers content
routing features enabling users to define, automate, and manage the tasks
associated with document creation and review. Hummingbird Imaging transforms
paper-based documents into digital knowledge assets through capture, markup,
and OCR capabilities, enabling access and storage of paper-based and electronic
documents in a consolidated repository. Hummingbird Web Publishing is a
template-driven solution for creating and maintaining corporate Web sites,
automatically transforming content into HTML or XML from external file systems
and Hummingbird DM repositories.

Records Management (RM)

Records Management (RM) is a wide-ranging discipline that extends the
functionality of content/document management systems to enable the management
and categorization of electronic records. RM includes features that govern the
filing, movement and disposal of enterprise records that are instrumental in
managing the entire lifecycle of enterprise content. Hummingbird's core records
management product is Hummingbird RM.

Knowledge Management (KM)

Knowledge Management (KM) software builds a comprehensive index of all terms
that appear in documents, which can then be searched in their original format
for relevant information. Unlike traditional database management systems, KM
software does not require information to be rigorously structured before it is
stored and later accessed. KM technology provides an effective mechanism for
retrieving documents based on their content without needing to know where
specifically on an organization's networks they may be physically stored.

Hummingbird's core knowledge management product is Hummingbird KM. Acquired
through the purchase of PC DOCS Group International Inc. in 1999, the
technology was formerly known as the Fulcrum family of products, specifically
SearchServer and Knowledge Server.

Collaboration

As awareness of the value of enterprise knowledge increases, organizations are
becoming increasingly interested in capturing information that resides outside
traditional systems. This problem has been compounded by the fact that workers
are increasingly decentralized and mobile. Collaboration software captures the
interactions between groups of users, in the context of the projects to which
they relate, so that the information revealed in their exchanges can be
leveraged in subsequent activities. Hummingbird's core collaboration product is
Hummingbird Collaboration. Acquired with the purchase of PeopleDoc Limited in
2001, the technology was previously known as PD Accord.

Business Intelligence (BI) and Extraction, Transformation and Loading
(ETL)

Companies today recognize that in order to remain competitive they require
solutions that leverage their data assets. The data integration and reporting
market, sometimes also referred to as the "data analysis market" encompasses
three main areas: data warehousing (framing and unifying multiple data sources
in a coherent information repository), data exchange (transforming and
exchanging information between disparate enterprise applications to achieve
consistency between operational systems), and query and reporting (user-driven
multidimensional querying, reporting, manipulating and exploring data to
discover and analyze trends and patterns).

The demand for data integration and reporting technologies has surged in recent
times, driven by the general business climate of increased competition.
Companies in nearly every industry are looking to improve their time-to-market,
customer services, and operational processes by utilizing more effectively and
quickly the vast amounts of data they acquired and invested in. In essence,
data integration and reporting software allows companies to transform
information into knowledge, enabling fast and informed business decisions. In
addition, there is an ongoing trend toward decisions being made at lower levels
of many organizations. Data integration and reporting software equips
employees at all organizational levels with decision-support tools that reduce
training time and that are tailored to their environments.

The Company's core business intelligence product is Hummingbird BI. Acquired
with the purchase of Andyne Computing Limited in 1998, the technology was
formerly known as the BI/Suite family of products. The Company's core data
integration product is Hummingbird ETL. Acquired with the purchase of Leonard's
Logic, SA in 1999, the technology was formerly known as Genio.

Portal

Hummingbird Portal is the Company's portal offering in the enterprise content
management marketplace. Recent and future enhancements of Hummingbird Portal
are focused on increasing the extent of integration between the framework and
the Company's content/document management, knowledge management, collaboration,
business intelligence and extract, transform and load (ETL) solutions. The
Company maintains an open metadata strategy and publishes XML-based application
programming interfaces (APIs) for integrating additional applications into the
Hummingbird Portal environment. Through this integrated approach, the products
that form the Hummingbird Enterprise suite provide access to all
business-critical information and resources, transforming information into
intelligence.

During fiscal 2000 and 2001 the Company's go-to-market strategy was to lead
primarily with its enterprise portal offering. As the market evolved, however,
the Company's other information management technologies have proven to be
significant competitive differentiators. Accordingly, in February 2002, the
Company launched a new brand identity that streamlined its product naming
conventions and emphasized its full range of technologies in a more balanced
approach. The Hummingbird Portal technology was formerly known as Hummingbird
EIP.

Connectivity Industry Background

Connectivity solutions provide desktop users with access to mission critical
back office applications on legacy systems. They enable organizations to
increase operational efficiencies by providing transparency between various
software platforms on which files are created and maintained throughout an
organization. Because of the importance of linking internal organizations,
connectivity solutions are considered part of the foundation of most
organizations' systems. The connectivity market includes host access,
traditional (PC to host) client, and Web to host client access products. The
Company believes that periodic desktop and software upgrades, as well as growth
in the number of end-users, will continue to support demand for the connectivity
market in the future.

Hummingbird Connectivity (formerly known as Host Access and Network
Connectivity) includes the Company's traditional applications for accessing
back-office UNIX, AS/400 and mainframe applications from Windows desktops and
the Web. A renaming of these product families occurred in February 2002 as part
of a comprehensive re-branding initiative that was undertaken by the Company.

X Window and X Servers

During the 1990s the X Window system grew in popularity largely due to the
increased deployment of the UNIX operating system in client/server
environments. Although X Window was designed as a universal network-based
graphics and windowing system and is commonly used for applications running on
Digital VMS, IBM mainframe and other operating systems, its most significant
application is in UNIX environments. X Window has assisted in the expansion of
the UNIX market by providing an industry-standard network windowing solution
for UNIX, utilizing an intuitive graphical user interface. The X Window
protocol is currently at version X11R6.6. "Broadway" is an extension the X
protocol, which allows Broadway-enabled browsers and companion X servers to
provide remote access to interactive Windows and UNIX applications over the
Internet.

Today, virtually all UNIX systems are shipped with X Window bundled in. PC X
server software was introduced in 1988 to enable PCs to display X Window
applications. PC X server software became accepted as an attractive means of
enabling PC users to obtain access to X applications on a network, while still
permitting local desktop DOS or Windows application processing. With the
proliferation of more powerful Pentium-based PCs, PC X server software has
evolved to deliver higher performance at significantly lower incremental cost.


PC-X servers evolved to become a vital component of PC networking, offering a
wide variety of connectivity and administrative features. The functionality of
PC-X server products increased significantly as user requirements became more
sophisticated. Today, PC-X server products deliver a highly functional suite of
networking utilities and services, including file and print services, various
terminal emulations, security tools, network management abilities, and other
integrated applications. A PC running PC-X server software can simultaneously
display multiple X applications and local PC applications in separate windows,
enabling the user to copy and paste data, text and graphics from one window to
another. This allows the transfer of information among otherwise incompatible
computer environments. Since the graphical user interfaces of Windows and
OSF/Motif, the most commonly used window manager in the X Window environment,
are similar in look and feel, users can switch easily from Windows applications
to X applications.

The Company believes that the historical growth in the PC-X server market is
attributable primarily to the large installed base of PCs networked via the
TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP is the most commonly used protocol both for open
inter-connectivity among disparate networks and for X Windows networking. Over
the years, the proliferation of UNIX workstations and the increased number of
X-compliant applications also drove the growth in the PC-X server market;
however, since a PC running PC-X server software can simultaneously display
multiple X applications these drivers have diminished in importance. Going
forward, demand for X Windows applications is being driven primarily by
increases in the number of end-users using the applications.

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the PC-X server market in
1999 was valued at US $124.4 million. IDC estimated that the Company's flagship
connectivity product, Exceed(TM) held over 71% of the worldwide PC-X server
market. The Company has been the market share leader since 1991. According to
IDC, in 1999, the Company's closest competitor had a 20% share of the market.
IDC discontinued its coverage of the PC X server market in 2000 and thus,
market size figures have not been available for the last three years. However,
the Company believes that its market share remains relatively consistent with
the IDC figures reported above.

There can be no assurance that the Company's market share will remain at this
level in the future.
 

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