Friday, 21 October 2005 10:05 EST

Wick Hill becomes one stop shop for host connectivity and security solutions following Hummingbird appointment

21 October 2005: The death of the host access market has been greatly exaggerated according to Wick Hill who has just been appointed by Hummingbird as sole distributor in the UK for its network connectivity products.

Contrary to popular perception, the market for traditional PC-to-host and more recent Web-to-host products is still growing and IDC predicts that the global market will reach $1.12 billion dollars worldwide by 2007. Wick Hill believes that the two key drivers in the UK market will be consolidation as companies move to standardise on a single vendor, along with the investment in security.

“While companies invest large amounts of time and money in securing their IP networks, many have ignored the fact that most host access connections to legacy mainframes, UNIX systems and AS/400s are unauthenticated and unencrypted and run in open session over the network,” says Ian Kilpatrick, director at Wick Hill. “Hummingbird has an excellent range of products using technologies such as SSH, SSL or Kerboros that can easily be implemented to address these problems, but at the moment there are literally millions of host access sessions still at risk.”

Wick Hill will now offer Hummingbird products alongside Attachmate WRQ products, through their recently expanded connectivity team, making it the single one stop shop for the majority of connectivity customers in the UK. The latest Hummingbird Connectivity™ 2006 suite includes Exceed®, NFS Maestro™, HostExplorer™ and Connectivity Secure Shell™. Hummingbird Connectivity 2006 provides a single, consolidated solution that allows organisations to securely integrate heterogeneous legacy infrastructures, such as UNIX® or Mainframe, with Windows® desktops, enabling customers to meet business continuity and corporate governance requirements.

“Wick Hill has 25 years experience in the host access market and unmatched knowledge and skills,” said Rod Desmeules, Vice-President of Technology, EMEA, at Hummingbird. “We continue to develop and expand our range of NFS, terminal emulation, PC X server and Security solutions and see Wick Hill as the ideal partner to support us in the UK and get the security message across. We expect to see considerable growth over the next few years.”

Following the Hummingbird appointment, Wick Hill is further strengthening its dedicated technical support team for connectivity and security products and will be actively raising greater awareness of security issues around host access.

About Wick Hill

Established in 1976, VAD (value added distributor) Wick Hill specialises in secure infrastructure solutions. The company's portfolio covers security, performance, access, services and management. Wick Hill sources and delivers best-of-breed, easy-to-use solutions through its channel partners, providing customer support, implementation, training and technical services.

For further press information, please contact Peter Rennison or Allie Andrews at PRPR on 01442 245030, e-mail . For reader queries contact Wick Hill on 01483 227600, email , web www.wickhill.com.

About Hummingbird Connectivity™

Hummingbird Connectivity is a comprehensive set of core network technologies that enables the enterprise to connect to any type of legacy system. Hummingbird Connectivity seamlessly delivers enterprise mission critical data to the user desktop. Based on robust and recognized standards, every Hummingbird Connectivity product is designed to bridge the gap between legacy systems and enterprise users by delivering the quickest, easiest, and most secure single point of access to UNIX systems, Mainframes and AS/400s.

About Hummingbird

Hummingbird Ltd. (NASDAQ: HUMC, TSX: HUM) is a leading global provider of enterprise software solutions. The Company's enterprise software solutions fall into two principal categories: enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, and network connectivity solutions. Hummingbird's ECM solutions enable organizations to manage the lifecycle of enterprise content from creation to disposition, thereby enabling organizations to address critical business needs, such as information management, business continuity, compliance and risk mitigation. The network connectivity solutions provide a comprehensive set of core network technologies that enables the enterprise to connect to any type of legacy system.

Founded in 1984, Hummingbird employs over 1,525 people and serves more than 33,000 customers, including 90% of Fortune 100. Hummingbird solutions are sold worldwide through our Alliance Network of partners and resellers. For more information, visit http://www.hummingbird.com