Canadian Andyne Computing Ltd, settling in following shareholder approval of its acquisition by Hummingbird Communications Ltd last week (CI No 3,321), officially opened its new UK offices yesterday and outlined its strategy as Hummingbird’s business intelligence division. Network communications and X/terminal software specialist Hummingbird has made no secret of the fact that it wants to get a slice of the datawarehousing cake and the purchase of business intelligence outfit Andyne is the first of several it has up its sleeve to give it a full datawarehousing portfolio. Andyne admits that so far, there is no natural synergy between the two companies’ products, but where they do cross over is in their target customers, and both companies believe these customers will benefit from having just one salesperson knocking on the door. However, Andyne vice president product marketing David Waugh says there is far greater synergy in the two companies’ new product development. Andyne is currently in final development of a new multi-tier, server-based architecture for its products, where the business intelligence software, querying, reporting and analysis, will sit on a middle tier server, and be accessible both by a fat client or a thin client, including a web-based client. Waugh says it is unique in its ability to enable reports to be published once on the server, and accessed by any type of client. It is answering an increasing demand from users to deploy business intelligence applications throughout the organization, he says. Hummingbird has also been working on a multi-tier architecture, and on an object request broker, and Waugh says there is some overlap here. Andyne will operate as a separate division within Hummingbird, although the final details of the merger have not yet been made public. Hummingbird will also be moving into the new Andyne UK office in Wokingham, Berkshire, which looks like becoming the combined company’s European headquarters. Andyne will retain its headquarters in Kingston, Ontario. One thing which is apparently certain is that none of Andyne’s 220 staff will lose their jobs. In fact Waugh says both Hummingbird and Andyne have been growing significantly, and both still have job vacancies. Andyne’s new architecture should be available by the end of this quarter or early next quarter. For its part, Hummingbird apparently intends to build its data warehousing operation both through growth and acquisition, and is likely to be on the look out for a data mining and a data mart operation at the very least.
