October 25, 1999
Hummingbird Announces Genio MetaLink for SAP R/3(R)
Genio MetaLink enables data exchange with SAP R/3 for enhanced e-business
BOSTON, Oct. 25 /CNW/ - DCI's Data Warehouse World -- October 25th & 26th, 1999; TORONTO - October 25th & 26th,
1999 - Hummingbird Communications Ltd. (TSE: HUM, NASDAQ: HUMC), an industry-leading enterprise software vendor, today announces the immediate availability of Genio MetaLink for SAP R/3, the first aspect of its ERP-related electronic business strategy. This also makes the large number of SAP implementations worldwide a leading target for Hummingbird's Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) roll-out which starts this December.
Early customers are agreeing. ``Tobaccoland chose Genio over other solutions due to its performance and integration with SAP R/3 and Hyperion Essbase,' said Jorg Dieckmann, chief controller of Tobaccoland, the largest distributor of tobacco goods in Germany, SAP's home market and continuing source of key R/3 innovations. ``Genio's impact analysis capabilities will reduce the maintenance requirements of our solution, thus providing lower total cost of ownership'.
Organizations that have implemented ERP systems such as SAP R/3 at the core of their business operations are now seeking means of e-enabling their customer and supplier relationships. They want to leverage their existing infrastructure without the challenge of directly connecting third-parties to the raw source data of an ERP repository. Genio MetaLink for SAP R/3 features customized drivers that enable organizations to extract and transform SAP data for use in multiple customer-facing environments. This can populate data warehouses to provide comprehensive support for rapid decision-making and offer protected data staging infrastructures for building advanced e-business applications. MetaLink for SAP R/3 is also 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.
``Efforts to streamline operational processes through multiple ERP/CRM systems have still left many organizations struggling to effectively integrate disparate data sources and provide enterprise information that supports effective decision making', said Dr. Wolfgang Martin, vice president of META Group's Application Delivery Strategies, a leading IT research and advisory firm. ``Second generation data exchange solutions with their broker-based, hub-and-spoke architecture have been designed to integrate enterprise data and provide accurate information on demand, thereby improving business performance management. Companies who offer these solutions, such as Hummingbird, can help their customers gain strategic flexibility when building their business architecture.'
According to industry analysts, the market for enterprise application integration products and services is expected to grow to more than $30 billion by the year 2004.
``Through MetaLink for SAP R/3, Genio now offers SAP R/3 installations worldwide a complete solution to integrate their enterprise data', said 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.'
Genio MetaLink for SAP R/3 provides:
- An intuitive graphical environment for viewing, sourcing and mapping
SAP R/3 data by accessing the data at the logical level via internal
SAP meta-tables
- Access to pool, cluster and transparent tables in SAP R/3
- Integration at the metadata level by automatically importing technical
and business metadata from SAP R/3 into the Genio Repository
- Ability to show the relationships between tables and to manage these through the transformation process with Genio's full impact analysis capabilities
- Ability to exchange IDoc messages asynchronously at the transaction level
About Genio Suite
Genio Suite enables IT professionals to realize data exchange from any source to any target across the spectrum of operational and decision support systems in the enterprise, including data warehouses, OLAP cubes, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and financial systems. Genio automates many of the tasks that normally require time-consuming programming, allowing users to rapidly develop data transformation routines with immediate return on investment. |
