Hummingbird Announces Extraction and Portal Strategy for ERP
M. Reed - October 27, 1999

Event Summary

Boston, October 25 /CNW-PRN/-Hummingbird Communications Limited (TSE:HUM,NASDAQ:HUMC), announced the immediate availability of Genio MetaLink for SAP R/3. This is the first product in their new ERP-related electronic business strategy. Hummingbird also announced the rollout of the Hummingbird Enterprise Information Portal, which will be available in December. Customers are currently challenged to make enterprise resource planning system data available to customers and suppliers, without directly connecting third parties to the raw source data of the ERP system. This product is designed to populate external data warehouses and provide protected data staging infrastructures for building e-business applications. MetaLink for SAP R/3 is CA-ALE certified by SAP and provides a driver for SAP's Intermediate Document Format (IDoc) to facilitate data exchange between SAP R/3 and other enterprise operational systems. According to Alp Hug, Product Manager for the Decision Portals division of Hummingbird, 'Genio MetaLink for SAP R/3 initiates Hummingbird's drive to provide full data exchange between enterprise systems, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. This exchange capability allows consistent information flow across operational systems, a pre-requisite for opening up the enterprise for broad e-business'. The product provides a graphical environment for mapping R/3 data by accessing the data at the logical level via internal SAP meta-tables; allows access to pool, cluster, and transparent tables; and the ability to exchange IDoc messages asynchronously at the transaction level...