Liquid Machines, Inc. announced a new Solutions Provider program that will enable Value Added Resellers (VARs), Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and System Integrators to leverage Liquid Machines ERM solutions. Liquid Machines Enterprise Rights Management solutions provide comprehensive control of electronic corporate assets throughout the information lifecycle. Liquid Machines auto-integration technology allows seamless integration with existing desktop and back-office applications to ensure that information is used according to corporate policies, making users more efficient and reducing the risk of compliance violations and intellectual property leakage. Liquid Machines Solutions Providers are eligible to resell Liquid Machines Document Control and Email Control products as part of their information security, regulatory compliance, and email archive practices and solutions at a significant discount to their customers. Partner benefits include not-for-resale Liquid Machines software, marketing support and tools, product training, technical support, and access to qualified lead pass programs. Liquid Machines Solutions Provider program is well-suited for Enterprise Rights Management partners as well as Intelligent Archiving and Secure Email Solutions providers. Liquid Machines solutions support Windows RMS to allow Microsoft customers to extend RMS protection to non-office and non-Microsoft applications. Liquid Machines also maintains partnerships with information lifecycle management vendors Veritas and EMC, and has certified the Liquid Machines Email Control product to work with both vendors archival products.

Vivisimo upgraded the Vivisimo Velocity enterprise search platform. The new version of Velocity offers comprehensive reporting capabilities, enhanced security, meta-alerts and collaboration features for better management of the information retrieval process. Vivisimo Velocity is a rapid-deployment, customizable enterprise search platform that combines dynamic clustering, search and meta-search into one solution. The platform is built on Vivisimo software and includes the company’s Clustering Engine. Velocity’s new comprehensive reporting feature is entirely customizable and enables administrators to ask and answer critical business questions. Velocity document-level security provides administrators complete control over access to individual documents or groups of documents. It allows only authorized users access to search results involving sensitive information. Velocity allows users to set up alerts from multiple sources of information from a single point of access. Users no longer need to access each source individually; instead, they can initiate and receive alerts for a topic from several sources in one combined email. Alerts can be initiated simply by clicking on a result or by adding them through user profiles. With a simple click, Velocity users can export results into Endnotes, Procite or Reference Manager, email reports in HTML or plain text format, or save reports as text, HTML or XML. Vivisimo Velocity pricing starts at $10,000 per year and scales with the number of documents to be crawled or meta-searched. The upgraded Velocity search platform will ship within 30 days.

Hot Banana Software Inc. announced that it will be launching Hot Banana On Demand, a Software-as-a-Service pricing model. The Hot Banana On Demand or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model offers benefits for companies of all sizes looking to reduce overhead, increase competitiveness and focus on core competencies. The key advantages of using the Hot Banana On Demand Web Content Management Suite (CMS), are accelerated implementation timelines, and faster ROI, lower up front costs, predictable ongoing expenses, reduced IT overhead and ease of installation, updates and maintenance. Hot Banana is actively positioning itself to capture a share of the global application hosting market. Hot Banana has the following pricing models for the three versions of the Hot Banana Web Content Management Suite – Small Business, Mid-Market, and Enterprise, depending upon the number of seats: Hot Banana On Demand for clients who want the convenience of rapid deployment of Software as a Service, and the lower monthly costs associated with the pay-as-you-go model; Hot Banana Licensed for clients who prefer a perpetual license, who want to own, install and run the software themselves in their own data centre, or choose a dedicated hosting installation at the Hot Banana Hosting Center. The new pricing model is designed to accelerate the market adoption and growth of Hot Banana. The on demand pricing model is complimentary to the existing Hot Banana software licensing model, and allows clients to choose which method of paying for a Web CMS is best for their business.

Serena Software, Inc. announced that the next release of Serena Collage, the company’s web content and change management solution will integrate with Macromedia Contribute 3.1, a rapid web authoring environment enabling customers to easily contribute, manage and update website content. The new integration enables users to easily make changes to site content within the familiar Contribute interface and save to Collage once changes are complete. In Collage, the content is automatically routed for further editing and approval, merged with other content and design elements and published to multiple destinations. Collage customers are able to take advantage of the rich web page authoring, offline editing and native support for Mac OS X that Contribute offers. Similarly, Contribute customers can extend their existing investment by employing Collage and benefit from enterprise-class versioning, workflow, tracking, content categorization, page generation and site deployment capabilities. Serena Collage v4.6 will be available in late April 2005 and will work with Macromedia Contribute 3.1. http://www.serena.com

Percussion Software introduced version 5.6 of its Rhythmyx Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution. Rhythmyx 5.6 is tailored for organizations that require seamless support for multiple Web properties, with an emphasis on reusing content and building engaging Web sites. Key new capabilities in Rhythmyx 5.6 include enhanced multi-site WCM capabilities, new accessibility support for content contributors, broader support for heterogeneous IT environments as well as numerous enhancements to enable easier implementation and administration. Version 5.6 introduces comprehensive multi-site management capabilities for building engaging Web sites, targeted for organizations with a large Web presence. Each of the multi-site enhancements is built on Rhythmyx’s FastForward for WCM capabilities first introduced in Rhythmyx 5.5. FastForward enables users to get their initial sites under management rapidly. Rhythmyx 5.6 also adds accessibility support for disabled users for the product’s content contributor interfaces. Rhythmyx 5.6 supports Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Linux and Sun Solaris platforms and is available now. Pricing varies depending on configuration, however a typical Rhythmyx 5.6 configuration starts at $95,000. http://www.percussion.com

Topologi announced the availability of the Topologi Difference Detective, a low-cost, lightweight utility for displaying changes between different versions of files, including XML data. The Difference Detective is a utility for anyone involved in document editing or XSLT transformation. The Topologi Difference Detective supports three levels of reporting. For small, dense files such as XSLT scripts or XML Schemas there is a detailed word-by-word comparison showing all additions and deletions. For larger text files up to 100K size, a line-by-line comparison is available and for large and binary files, a byte-by-byte comparison quickly detects where two files are not the same. The Topologi Difference Detective also has a directory comparison mode, to compare files with the same names in two different directories. The Difference Detective is available now from the Topologi Tool Shop, as are a number of other utilities for querying and validating collections of XML data. There are several products due for release in the near future, including tools for helping with whitespace, links and character sets.