Stories about: Hummingbird Communications

Crestone International had a problem. The Atlanta-based e-commerce consultancy couldn't find enough local designers, programmers and other IT professionals to meet its rapidly escalating workload. Experiencing triple-digit growth each year since its 1995 founding, the company needed to find a way to get extra productivity out of its current employees--or face the disagreeable prospect of turning away work. "It wasn't a matter of cutting expenses; it was a question of long-term viability," says Cal Yonker, Crestone's president.

One of the more enjoyable outcomes of the growing trend toward outsourced software services is the chance to observe traditional software companies reinventing mainstay business processes, making them more accessible and far less expensive. This is precisely what BI (business intelligence) software maker InterNetivity Inc. has achieved in its recent launch of databeacon.com.

The Company: Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky; Founded 1953; Revenues $107 million; Location Washington, D.C.; Employees 550, including 230 attorneys; KM Problem How to create a unified method of gathering information in a company with isolated and fragmented information sources; URL www.dsmo.com.

As the timetable shortens for U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's decision in the government's antitrust case against Microsoft, both sides were in a flurry of negotiation activity last week.

Remaining nimble in the Information Age is no easy feat. Witness the ever-expanding EIP (enterprise information portal) market. Geared toward helping companies access buried enterprise resources and quickly sift enormous volumes of information, enterprise information portals aim to improve a company's decision-making aptitude by improving resource availability.

Today's competitive marketplace has made tools and techniques once used exclusively by business analysts nearly ubiquitous. Many corporations are deploying business intelligence (BI) applications to thousands of end-users.

E-commerce system providers Commerce One Inc. and InterWorld Corp. last week formed a partnership to help businesses set up buying and selling marketplaces over the Internet. Commerce One, a provider of Internet-based software systems for corporate purchasing portals, and InterWorld, a vendor of software and services for online business sales, said they plan to develop applications for businesses to use over Commerce One's MarketSite Global Trading Portal, an online exchange. The companies plan to have products available for sale within four months.

Upcoming additions to the Secure Sockets (SOCKS) standard, detailed at the SOCKS Developer Conference on Monday, will make the security and policy-making specification more suitable for multicasting and multimedia application deployment.

Solution 6 has finally secured ownership of legal and accounting specialist CMS/Data for around $46 million.

Hummingbird Communications Ltd. is buying PC Docs Group International Inc. in a stock deal valued at about US$155 million [M], Hummingbird officials said at a press conference today.