By Kevin Murphy
Hummingbird Communications Ltd president and COO, Jim Tobin briefed analysts on the company’s plans to build market capitalization up to a point where it can start getting aggressive on the acquisition front. The cornerstone of the new strategy is a focus around and enterprise information portal (EIP) product scheduled for launch in January 2000. We need to become a predator, Tobin said, and to do that we need the market cap. The company is under-appreciated according to Tobin, who claims that Genio [Hummingbird’s data transformation tool] competes very well with Informatica Corp. But they have an over $800m market cap. Hummingbird’s market cap currently stands just under $390m, having almost doubled since he took over the job in June.
Since the Toronto, Canada-based company’s acquisition of PC Docs Group International Inc, Hummingbird has decided to become an EIP company – responding to the commoditization of the connectivity market, its traditional arena. The move comes hand in hand with a company-wide downsizing that will see over 100 employees lose their jobs, and an aggressive integration of PC Docs into the enlarged group. The marketing budget will also be cut as Hummingbird focuses on being the cover story, not the advertisement said Tobin.
A componentized EIP package will be released in the first quarter 2000, according to Tobin, containing elements of Genio, BI/Suite, its business intelligence query/report tool, as well as PC Docs’ Fusion and Fulcrum document and knowledge management tools. The whole thing will provide a single sign-on web-based knowledge portal where executives can, in theory, access selected structured and unstructured data via a regular browser. A beta will be released in December, and Hummingbird will demo the software at a trade show next month ahead of the first quarter release.
Also in the first quarter, Tobin expects to announce partnerships with four major IT players, one of which will come from the ranks of Oracle Corp, Microsoft Corp, and Sun Microsystems Inc. There will also be an alliance with a major ERP vendor and key vertical partners said Tobin.
