McLaughlin joins Thunderhead from FileNet where he was vice president of product marketing with worldwide responsibility for FileNet's go-to-market strategy in the Enterprise Content Management market. At Thunderhead, McLaughlin will lead Thunderhead's global brand and product strategy, as well as develop strategic partnerships with complementary vendors and key industry associations.

"Business regulations are threatening to suffocate financial services companies on both sides of the Atlantic unless they can put in place a enterprise communications infrastructure that can cope with the constant compliance demands while leaving the organisation free to innovate and compete," said Glen Manchester, CEO, Thunderhead. "Thunderhead has rapidly established itself as the multi-channel communications platform of choice for investment banks and retail financial services companies. We're delighted to welcome Chris to the team with his deep understanding of both the US market and the broader enterprise content management landscape. Coming hard on the heels of Paul Kelly joining us as VP worldwide sales, Chris' appointment is a critical part of our ramping up in advance of a major expansion in the US market."

"Thunderhead is a dynamic, rapidly growing organisation with a best-in-class product, an exceptional customer base, and a bright vision for the future of their marketplace," commented McLaughlin. "This new role offers me an outstanding opportunity to help shape a recognised technology leader into an established market leading organisation with a global brand and sales and marketing presence."

Separately, Thunderhead, the leading provider of enterprise communications technology, today announced the launch of Thunderhead, version 3.0.

This new version enhances the enterprise capabilities of the core platform, which is currently deployed by major investment banks and retail financial services organizations.

Thunderhead brings together ad hoc, batch and real-time document generation functionality to deliver a single, scalable solution to address business communications requirements across the entire enterprise.

Version 3.0 delivers advanced output management, enhanced security, enterprise-class scalability, and out-of-the-box interoperability with leading enterprise content management (ECM) infrastructures.

"Thunderhead version 3.0 retains its best-in-class usability, which our customers have come to expect, but exposes the true power of the technology to service an enterprise's entire document generation needs," commented Martin Davey, CTO, Thunderhead.

The Thunderhead 3.0 platform includes a number of key developments that advance its position as an enterprise-ready document generation solution:

• Output Management - Thunderhead 3.0 introduces a new Output Management Suite, enabling a range of output options to be implemented across the enterprise, including support for Advanced Function Printing (AFP).
• Security - Thunderhead 3.0 introduces Kerberos based single sign-on authentication.
• Interoperability - Thunderhead 3.0 offers improved interoperability with leading ECM infrastructures, providing out-of-the-box interfaces for a number of leading ECM platforms.
• Performance & Scalability - Thunderhead 3.0's Job Load Balancer enables the platform to be deployed across a farm of servers, providing efficient horizontal scaling and enhanced high-availability and fail-over capabilities.

Additional functionality in Thunderhead's Correspondence and Review Framework modules, for ad-hoc communications and non-STP exceptions-handling, provide enhanced flexibility and control for business communications, whether they are ad hoc, batch or real-time communications.

"Although advanced document generation is well established at a departmental level in financial services firms, personalized business communications take place throughout the entire organization," said Glen Manchester, CEO, Thunderhead. "It's imperative that the business remains in control of all communications, from the high volume batch communications to the ad-hoc customer service letters".

General availability of the Thunderhead Document Generation Platform 3.0 is July 2006.