INDUSTRY NEWS SHORTS - April 1998

NOW AVAILABLE from Excalibur Technologies (http://www. excalib.com) is a Kanji version of RetrievalWare. Under a reseller agreement, Sony Marketing (Japan, http://www.sony.co.jp www.sony.co.jp) integrated the Japanese morphology system and Kanji dictionary and will now resell the product.

According to a statement from The Delphi Group (http://www.delphigroup.com www.delphigroup.com), "With this latest internationalized release, Excalibur strengthens its positioning by providing native-format support for character-based text outside the stable of European languages."

A COMPREHENSIVE BENCHMARKING REPORT for knowledge management solutions results from an agreement between industry analyst Doculabs (http://www.doculabs.com www.doculabs.com) and Knowledge Asset Media, publishers of KMWorld (http://www.KMWorld.com www.KMWorld.com).

The Knowledge Management Benchmarking Special Report features comparisons of currently available knowledge management products and market analyses conducted by Doculabs.

"We have closely tracked the emergence of the knowledge management marketplace and understand there is confusion about which products actually qualify as knowledge management tools," said Tom Loeb, VP of marketing for Doculabs.

The report is available from Knowledge Asset Media by calling 800-444-6243 or at http://www.KMWorld.com/doculabs www.KMWorld.com/doculabs.

AN INTEGRATION AND MARKETING AGREEMENT between IntraNet Solutions (http://www.intranetsol.com www.intranetsol.com) and Adobe Systems (http://www.adobe.com www.adobe.com) will see IntraNet Solutions market Adobe Framemaker software and integrate its Intra.Doc management system with Framemaker and Adobe's Acrobat Capture.

"Adobe's products fit in well with our strategy to provide online access to knowledge content in a managed Web repository," said Bob Olson, president and CEO of IntraNet Solutions.

"Integrating Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe Acrobat Capture with Intra.doc MS provides a Web-based document management solution that can easily manage a variety of documents--including long or complex documents created in FrameMaker--or bringing paper documents online with Acrobat Capture," said Sharon Grimshaw, director of marketing at Adobe.

AN ACQUISITION of Bradley Company (http://www.bradleycompany.com www.bradleycompany.com) by Xerox (mailto:www.xerox.com www.xerox.com) is designed to bolster its services and solutions offerings for automated forms processing and document management.

"This acquisition will strengthen our position in forms-intensive industries such as healthcare, financial services and insurance--where forms can represent 40 to 80% of the documents produced or used," said Norman E. Rickard, president of Xerox's Document Services Group.

Bradley's two flagship products--Spectrum Plus and PrintLink--are used to manage the requisitioning, procurement, receiving, inventory, cost allocation, warehousing and distribution of internally consumed goods, supplies and documents. Bradley, which has partnered with Xerox for five years and will now be an independent subsidiary of Xerox, will continue to offer its products and consulting services directly to customers and through partnerships. Xerox Business Services plans to launch outsourcing services built around the Bradley application by mid-year.

FOCUSING ON STRATEGIC TRANSACTION SOLUTIONS for the financial and payment processing industries, Wheb Systems (http://www.whebsys.com www.whebsys.com) and Wausau Financial Systems (http://www.wausaufs.com www.wausaufs.com) will unite Wheb's Intelligent Forms Processing System (IFPS) and Wausau's ImageRPS remittance application.

"Out in the real world the technologies come together a lot," said John Notham, Wheb Systems business development manager. "It's really moving toward an enterprisewide solution."

"This alliance will provide customers with a unified solution for their total system requirements, thereby eliminating the need for multiple standalone systems," said Jerry Stoddard, AVP commercial sales manager for Wausau.

Ray Edwards, president of Lighthouse Consulting Group (http://www.lhcg.comwww.lhcg.com), said, "People recognize that Wheb and Wausau are leaders in their fields and markets." The agreement is likely to be the first of many "best-of-breed partnerships to deliver holistic solutions. It just underscores and validates that fact that the check remittance and document components in banking are going to converge," he added.

AN EXPANDED PARTNERSHIP between document management provider PC Docs (http://www.pcdocs.comwww.pcdocs.com) and consultant, computer application developer and integrator M&H Enterprises (http://">www. mhent.com) is designed to deliver solutions to manufacturing companies. M&H Enterprise's Process Safety Management (WinPSM) and Quality Systems Management (WinQSM) applications will be paired with Docs Open as a solution for complying with a number of key safety and quality assurance standards.

Said Ed LoTurco, PC Docs' director of industry marketing for manufacturing, "M&H has a strong track record and innovative technical solutions that will help us to deliver a fast path to effective, cost-efficient solutions. For customers, these solutions result in safe and trouble-free operations and the competitive advantage of a strong quality assurance program."

NOW CERTIFIED for use as an ad hoc query and report writing tool for Sybase's (http://www.sybase.comwww.sybase.com) Adaptive Server IQ is IQ Software's (http://www.iqsoftware.comwww.iqsoftware.com) IQ/Objects. "The combination of IQ/Objects' flexible, object-based report development environment, coupled with its unique three-tier architecture and Web capabilities, make it uniquely suited to our customers who are developing high-end, high-performance and high-volume data warehousing solutions," said Pam Whitmore, director of data warehouse solutions development for Sybase.

A NEW VERSION of Kofax Image Product's (http://www.kofax.comwww.kofax.com>) Ascent Capture is designed to better integrate with PC Docs' (http://www.pcdocs.comwww.pcdocs.com) Docs Open.

"This latest release module makes Docs Open and Capture a flexible, seamless, cost-effective solution for enterprise document imaging and management," said Tom Bartley, VP of product management of technologies at PC Docs.

The free Ascent CaptureVersion 2.0 module is compatible with Docs Open Versions 2.5 and above. The solution will scan, index and export more than 100,000 pages per day to Docs Open, which can manage repositories of millions of documents, according to the manufacturers. New features of 2.0 include output to TIFF and/or PDF, full-text indexing, a streamlined interface and full support for the Docs Open security model.

TO FOCUS ON ITS CORE BUSINESS, Mosaix (http://www.mosaix.comwww.mosaix.com) has sold its Scout call management software to Contact Point Technologies (http://www.contactpt.comwww.contactpt.com). Effective immediately, Contact Point assumes responsibility for ongoing product development, product support, sales and channel marketing support for all versions of the product.

The move pulls Mosaix away from call management solutions to smaller organizations, allowing it to focus on systems for enterprise customer contact centers that typically include large, formal call centers.

"This agreement enables Mosaix to focus on its strategy of delivering best-of-class call management systems and enterprise-level applications," said Steve Adams, Mosaix senior VP of marketing.

AN AGREEMENT between Siemens Nixdorf (http://www.electrocomimaging.comwww.electrocomimaging.com) and Oracle (http://www.oracle.comwww.oracle.com) will result in new network-centric offerings for combining the two companies' hardware and software products. SNI and Oracle will form strategic business units to provide a single point of contact for their customers' database, hardware and solution providers.

The initial fruits of this agreement will be an SNI/Siemens Pyramid server bundled with an Oracle database, and vertical market-focused networked computing systems, all of which will be available in Q2 '98. The business units, consisting of 50 engineering, marketing and management personnel from both companies, will focus on developing information systems that are scalable from desktop to data center. "With this new business unit, we further dedicate ourselves to providing best-of-breed, targeted applications that are built from the ground up," said Ed Blechschmidt, president and CEO of Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems.