February 2003, London, England - Hornbill Systems Limited, an innovative provider of support and service management systems, will unveil the solution organisations need to establish a unilateral support services standard for every service request scenario. The unveiling of Support-Works Version 6 and its Enterprise Partner Programme will take place at the forthcoming Helpdesk & IT Support Show 2003 to be held at Olympia, London, from April 29th to May 1st. Hornbill's stand is 220.

Hornbill's reputation grew from its ability to provide high-performance client/server based helpdesk solutions using its unique Non-Polling Architecture (NPA). Early versions of Support-Works Helpdesk Professional attracted many customers because of its exceptional performance across any network. Adopters of later versions Support-Works Helpdesk Professional chose the solution for its operational benefits: its inherent workflow, configurability and its easy communication links with analysts and end-users. A broad range of private and public sector organisations have adopted Support-Works as their service management solution and Hornbill have seen a significant uptake of the product to support environments other than simple IT helpdesks including Accounts, Personnel, Facilities Management and Field Service to name but a few. Customers now include Renault Formula One, University of Exeter, Medas, Addleshaw Booth, Macdonalds and Schering Plough.

Existing customers will benefit from the enhancements that have been made to Support-Works Helpdesk Professional V6.0. The IT Support capabilities are enhanced significantly as many of the new features greatly encapsulate the spirit of ITIL and other structured best practice disciplines, its SLA model has been expanded to deliver better metrics for managing Operational Level Agreements (OLA's) and 3rd party suppliers and the workflow interface enables business processes such as Change Requests to be managed by introducing a fully configurable, automated workflow engine. Version 6.0 is available as a free-of-charge upgrade for all maintained customers. As an optional add-on Hornbill has introduced an additional module that provides the facility of automated transaction based customer satisfaction surveys so the true impact of an organisation's support services can be measured for effectiveness and improvements.

The most significant advance in Version 6.0 is the introduction of a fully scriptable forms environment that provides a configuration interface similar to .NET forms, and other forms based high level programming interfaces, to allow customers to substantially change and configure the behaviour of the application to fit exact business processes. Support-Works now enables any business build, no matter how many individual helpdesks an organisation has; each requirement can be uniquely customised to satisfy different types of service requests, even on a single server deployment. The ability to maintain full connectivity to multiple database systems is key to providing full integration across many existing business systems. Each helpdesk or analyst view can be individually configured to present only data relating to the specific support service being managed.

Said Gerry Sweeney, Managing Director of Hornbill Systems Limited. "With organisations facing the challenge of delivering consistent services to its operations and with IT Managers struggling with the burden of maintaining multiple service request systems, Version 6.0 provides a pragmatic solution to an organisations support service requirements right across the board; from IT to Fleet Management, from Facilities to HR and Payroll. We believe we have created one of the most configurable and flexible service request management tools available and organisations who wish to adopt a single, scalable and configurable support toolset that will offer significant and visible ROI should seriously consider adopting Support-Works V6".

Although simple configuration changes and form design can be carried out by individuals with no previous scripting programming skills, to take full advantage of the applications configurable nature, basic programming skills comparable with those required to program a web page are an advantage. As well as offering consulting services to customers, Hornbill have introduced its Enterprise Partner Programme to deliver software tools and training support to customers and channel partners who wish to configure the Support-Works system without the need to maintain a total dependency on the consulting services of Hornbill. The programme will be delivered as part of an inclusive support and maintenance agreement.

Visitors to the Hornbill stand will be able to attend a series of presentations upon "Creating the Helpdesk Standard for your Organisation". Attendees will be able to enter a prize draw to win one of 15 Palm Pilots. Additionally Hornbill is the sponsor of a new white paper that is the most comprehensive industry salary & benefits survey carried out to date upon UK helpdesk staff. The research and white paper have been commissioned by the Helpdesk Institute and VCM and will only be available from the Hornbill stand, recipients of the white paper will also have the chance to win one of 20 red letter day vouchers worth £200 each.

Hornbill will be demonstrating the latest release of Support-Works PC Audit, an inventory and asset discovery tool. PC Audit Version 4.0 increases its, already extensive, product recognition engine, will collect inventory data from any device with an IP address using SNMP and provides a graphical representation of an organisation's networks and configuration.

About Hornbill Systems Limited
Founded in 1995 and based in London, Hornbill Systems is an independent software vendor specialising in helpdesk and computer-based inventory applications. The company's unique Non-Polling Architecture (NPA) provides unparalleled application performance and scalability never before seen in client/server applications. Hornbill's products are aggressively priced and have been implemented by many of the world's best known corporations. More information on the company and Helpdesk Professional at: www.hornbill.com.