Mustang,I suppose your company is related to real time, more than movie rendering... so, what about XSI? It has quite a nice character animation workflow.
:)
After the evaluation it was The One. Not only does it have rigging & animating tools that rock, but it's modeling tools are looking better than what LW has (and that's something). Our coders liked a lot dotxsi export ( for engine pipeline/integration) and the SDL docs were REALLY comprehensive. XSI is a good choice because it has EVERYTHING in one package; good modeler, good animation tools, normal map baker and top-notch renderer although we don't use that much.
Motion builder (too limited) and Maya (more expensive than XSI, and animation only) were looked at too of course, as well as MAX + CAT (too expensive). Cinema4D was dropped from the start and we didn't look at it.