New Delhi:

The enhanced suite of integrated technologies delivers a complete solution, encompassing all the components of a Smart Enterprise Suite (SES). The SES is defined by Gartner as a single vendor product offering bundling portal, collaborative and content and record management functionalities.

Gartner, a leading technology research and advisory firm, recently listed Hummingbird in the Visionary quadrant in the Smart Enterprise Suite Magic Quadrant. Visionaries are described as "companies that show a strong understanding of the likely evolution of the market." According to Gartner, because this is an emerging market, they have not yet identified any Leaders or Challengers.

The secure, consolidated platform of Hummingbird Enterprise 5.1, the second generation of SES components, provides a single integrated solution for the complete lifecycle management of enterprise content. Hummingbird Enterprise further enhances the SES offering with additional capabilities including full query, analysis and reporting functionalities and data integration tools for managing metadata and integrating enterprise applications.

"Gartner sees content management applications as one of the most practical ways to begin to realise benefits of knowledge management initiatives," says Mark Gilbert, vice-president and research director, Gartner. "By 2004, we predict the smart enterprise suite will emerge as a superset of content and records management, collaboration and portal frameworks. These portfolios of products have a common theme: they allow people to work together more efficiently by enabling greater information sharing."

Many of the enhancements made in Hummingbird Enterprise 5.1 are based on customer feedback and gained through the successful deployment of Hummingbird Enterprise 5.0. With the successful deployments, Hummingbird was able to monitor the environment and optimise the software to further enhance its existing performance and scalability.

Hummingbird Enterprise offers a full spectrum of capabilities allowing organisations to maximise the value of their intellectual content at the lowest cost of ownership. Currently, more than 300 customers, totalling approximately 150,000 seats worldwide, are migrating to Hummingbird Enterprise, collaborating and sharing information and work with employees, partners and customers in real time, from any location. The Hummingbird customer base spans a broad range of industry sectors including legal, professional services, government agencies, manufacturing, financial services, utilities, and many others.

Hummingbird Enterprise is easy to deploy and provides an intuitive access point to shared documents from a single repository. Customers migrating from the two-tier client/server environment offered in the earlier version of the Hummingbird document management software are benefiting from the significant enhancements in the secure, integrated multi-tier architecture.

"We found the transition from the two-tier client/server environment of DOCS Open, to the multi-tier architecture of Hummingbird DM much easier than we had anticipated," says Tim Golden, desktop architect, McGuireWoods LLP. "Many of our attorneys and staff  'live' in the email environment. Having a full featured document management client embedded directly into Outlook, and being able to drag-and-drop messages and attachments straight into Hummingbird DM repositories, has proven a great time-saver."

"We believe Hummingbird is differentiated in the marketplace by its ability to deliver a complete solution a suite that can be deployed, both as a stand-alone application or as part of an integrated suite, encompassing multiple components," says Andrew Pery, chief marketing officer, senior vice president, Hummingbird. "The highly integrated suite of knowledge-enabling technologies comprising Hummingbird Enterprise, empower our customers to maximise value from their intellectual capital while at the same time demonstrate a measurable return on their IT investments including lower deployment and administration costs."