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.
Market
Impact
The market
for enterprise application integration (EAI) products and services is expected
to grow to more than $30 billion by the year 2004. Genio is a relatively new
entrant to the business intelligence arena, having entered in March 1999 with
the purchase of Leonard's Logic SA. Genio 3.1 was only recently released. Previously,
Hummingbird was best known for its connectivity tools, including the Exceed
PC X-Windows connectivity product. The ability to create external data marts
or warehouses from ERP data that can be shared with customers outside the corporate
firewall will be key to ongoing customer relationship management, supply chain
management, and e-commerce efforts. The release of Genio MetaLink should allow
Hummingbird to compete in the relatively fierce business intelligence market
with older, more established players such as Ardent and Cognos. In addition,
Genio has integration with Hyperion Essbase, a leading OLAP product.
User
Recommendations
The fact that
Genio is SAP CA-ALE certified (the ALE concept involves using external converters
to connect non-SAP systems to the R/3 system, external converters are generic
format conversion programs), and IDoc-enabled (Intermediate Document Format,
a data interchange method) gives Hummingbird a competitive advantage over many
other vendors. Doubtless many SAP users are contemplating publishing ERP data
to outside customers and suppliers. Customers intending to publish SAP R/3 data
to external sources should include Genio on the long list of vendors to be evaluated
for a solution, keeping in mind the fact that Hummingbird is relatively new
to the business intelligence marketplace.