Hummingbird to Acquire PC Docs -- Redmondmag.com

Hummingbird to Acquire PC Docs

By Scott Bekker
03/05/1999

Hummingbird Communications Ltd. (www.hummingbird.com) and PC Docs Group International Inc. (www.pcdocs.com) today announced that they have entered into an agreement where by Hummingbird would acquire PC Docs Group. As a result of the transaction, PC Docs Group will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hummingbird.

This is in reaction to the demand in the enterprise market for a solution which provides a single point of access and analysis on the desktop for every kind of corporate information, including both structured data in databases, data warehouses and data marts and unstructured data such as word processing documents, spreadsheets, Web pages and e-mail messages.

Hummingbird's place in Business Intelligence with structured data, combined with PC Docs Group's position in Document and Knowledge Management with unstructured data, positions the combined company to deliver a comprehensive view of all relevant business information from document repositories, e-mail servers, groupware systems, data warehouses and the Web, all through a single Enterprise Knowledge Portal at the user's desk.

"The combination of Hummingbird and PC Docs Group will allow enterprise customers to purchase a broader range of products from a single vendor," says Fred Sorkin, president and CEO of Hummingbird. "This addresses the major enterprise software trend of corporations preferring to purchase integrated solutions from one vendor."

The PC Docs Group Knowledge Management solution allows for the creation of a company-wide information map or Enterprise Table of Contents. Hummingbird will integrate its Business Intelligence technology within the PC Docs Group Knowledge Management framework and its Financial and Case Management solutions. The resulting Enterprise Knowledge Portal solution will provide Internet access to all of the following in house technologies:

Query and reporting tools
OLAP
Data mining
Document management
Information retrieval
Content analysis and categorization

The transaction values PC Docs Group at approximately $155 million, representing a 38% premium for PC Docs Group shareholders based on the average closing prices of the two companies' shares over the last ten trading days prior to the announcement of the transaction. Following the completion of the transaction, which is estimated to be during May 1999, PC Docs Group will become an operating division of Hummingbird, continuing to serve and support its customers in close collaboration with the Hummingbird organization. -- Brian Ploskina, Assistant Editor

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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