Hummingbird unveils RedDot integration plans

By Graeme Burton

Hummingbird CEO Barry Litwin has sought to reassure RedDot web-content management (WCM) software users, by fleshing out the company’s integration plans. The takeover was essential for Hummingbird, says Litwin.

For some time, the market has been moving from point solutions – in which customers buy different products from different vendors and integrate them as best they can – to all-in-one suites, in which all the main components are bought from one vendor, pre-integrated.

“We had been partners with RedDot for quite a long time,” said Litwin. We had, I guess, just about as much integration as two companies can have without being a single entity. Web-content management is going through a ‘second coming’ right now, largely because many of the initial implementations of five or six years ago are falling apart right now.”

The difference between then and now, is that while organisations are designing more sophisticated websites, including e-commerce facilities, for example, they expect to pay considerably less for the software than they did in the dying days of the dotcom boom.

And as integration with other components of the enterprise-content management (ECM) suite is essential for customers, it is a task that Litwin has prioritised. “As we have learnt over the last five years, there is always more integration to do,” he said. That integration effort will include closer links between RedDot and Hummingbird’s workflow software so that content to be published with the RedDot WCM system can be initiated and approved from within Hummingbird’s workflow technology.

Longer term, Litwin plans to improve integration between RedDot and Hummingbird’s reporting software and also its search technology, too.

Litwin also has an ambitious plan to integrate RedDot with Microsoft Office in the same way as the rest of the Hummingbird suite. “We have got to get RedDot into that paradigm as well,” he said. Because most computer users are familiar with the Microsoft Outlook e-mail client, Litwin believes that it is essential for other end-user applications to work from within the Outlook interface.

Hummingbird acquired mid-market WCM software maker RedDot Solutions in June 2005 in a deal worth about EU40 million. The move reflects increasing consolidation in the market for content and knowledge-management technology. www.hummingbird.com