Industry moves

IBM buys Schlumberger data back-up division

THE ENERGY-services company Schlumberger has sold its business-continuity-services division to global technology provider IBM for an undisclosed fee.

Schlumberger has sold most of its IT units over the past couple of years because they failed to turn the expected profits. The company has begun dividing up its empire to recoup costs.

IBM will hire 260 Schlumberger employees as part of the deal, which will see it take over Schlumberger’s London-based data back-up facilities and a further 40 data centres throughout Europe and the US.

Analysts say IBM is keen to expand operations into the finance sector, and many of Schlumberger’s 750 business-continuity customers are banks and brokerages. The advent of corporate governance legislation, like the Sarbanes Oxley Act, is also thought to be crucial to IBM’s decision to move further into the data-continuity market.
www.ibm.com
www.slb.com
www.google.com

Vignette pursues Linux relationship

CONTENT-MANAGEMENT software company Vignette is adding to its existing support for Linux in Vignette Application Portal by announcing support for Vignette Content Management and Vignette Business Integration Studio.

The move is intended to reduce the cost of deploying and running web applications and drive business efficiency.
www.vignette.com
www.redhat.com

Sky’s the limit for Verity/MatrixOne alliance

VERITY, AN enterprise-software provider, and MatrixOne, a supplier of collaborative-product-lifecycle-management (PLM) solutions, are working together to embed Verity’s K2 advanced search and classification technologies into MatrixOne’s PLM solutions.

The companies hope that adding Verity’s search and classification functionality to MatrixOne’s PLM solution will improve lifecycle collaboration and offer better browsing. www.verity.com www.matrixone.com

Verity search technology lures Xerox

VERITY, AN enterprise-software provider, has had its advanced search technology embedded into Xerox DocuShare version 3.1, the corporation’s latest web-based document and content-management software.

Xerox DocuShare allows organisations to capture, store, manage and share hardcopy and electronic content. Extended use of Verity’s advanced search technology is expected to add to DocuShare’s appeal.
www.verity.co.uk
www.xerox.com

Documentum joins forces with Thunderhead

DOCUMENTUM, A provider of enterprise-content-management solutions, has announced a global strategic alliance with UK-based Thunderhead, a supplier of next-generation software platforms.

Documentum will combine its enterprise-content-management platform with Thunderhead’s document-generation technology to provide a solution aimed at highly regulated industries, and intended to streamline processes, achieve Straight-Through-Processing objectives, and reduce operational costs.
www.documentum.com
www.thunderhead.com

Hummingbird teams with LexisNexis

HUMMINGBIRD, A provider of integrated enterprise-content-management solutions, has released the Hummingbird Enterprise for Contracts Management solution, which aims to offer organisations a secure, web-based environment for real-time access to their contracts data and full document-lifecycle support.

By partnering with LexisNexis and its HotDocs document-automation software, Hummingbird intends to streamline the contracts, creation, approval and management process.
www.hummingbird.com
w ww.lexisnexis.com

Xerox business unit acquired by Documentum

DOCUMENTUM, A provider of enterprise-content-management solutions, has acquired the askOnce business unit of global technology provider Xerox.

The askOnce technology is expected to enable the content-integration component of Documentum’s new virtual repository solution. Virtual Repository is said to help customers assimilate a wide range of content types from a number of data resources, such as file servers, websites and enterprise applications.
www.documentum.com
www.askonce.com

Veritas partners with Autonomy to boost solution

VERITAS, A supplier of building blocks for utility computing, has embedded the technology of Autonomy, a provider of enterprise software, into its new data-lifecycle-management software.

Autonomy’s advanced pattern-recognition tools are expected to enable Veritas customers to perform advanced concept-based retrieval on e-mails and attachments in over 300 formats. Conceptual search is possible because Autonomy’s intelligent data-operating-layer software recognises word patterns and, over time, builds up an index of word clusters and acronyms.
www.veritas.com
www.autonomy.com

Hummingbird strengthens data-warehousing offering

HUMMINGBIRD, A provider of integrated enterprise-content-management solutions, has formed an alliance with Leading Edge, a business-intelligence-focused-systems integrator to provide affordable data-warehousing solutions and allow customers to cost effectively analyse tera-scale data.

Hummingbird’s ETL solution and business-intelligence and reporting software will be combined with Leading Edge’s Netezza enterprise-data-warehouse application to enable users to quickly extract data from a range of sources and optimise it for reporting purposes.
www.hummingbird.com
www.leadingedge.uk.com