BUSINESSOBJECTS Deployed as Front-End to Simon & Schuster Data Warehouse; Users Across the U.S. Employ BUSINESSOBJECTS to Query, Analyze, and Report on Strategic Corporate Data.CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 6, 1996--Business Objects today announced that a division of Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster U.S. publishing company. It was founded in 1924 by Richard L. Simon (1899–1960) and M. Lincoln Schuster (1897–1970), whose initial project, the original crossword-puzzle book, was a best-seller. , the world's largest educational publisher, has successfully implemented a strategic data warehouse utilizing BUSINESSOBJECTS for data query, analysis, and reporting. Business, sales, marketing, and inventory managers in Simon & Schuster's Elementary Education elementary education or primary education Traditionally, the first stage of formal education, beginning at age 5–7 and ending at age 11–13. Division use BUSINESSOBJECTS to tap into a wealth of corporate data such as information on customer purchasing patterns, sales figures sales figures npl → cifras fpl de ventas , inventory, and purchasing. This empowers the end users to make more informed, strategic decisions and saves Simon & Schuster time and money by not requiring constant involvement from the Information Systems (IS) staff. Using BUSINESSOBJECTS, more than 60 Simon & Schuster employees in five states can independently retrieve data stored in the division's data warehouse, analyze the information, and create customized reports, all from their desktops. Prior to BUSINESSOBJECTS, end users needing specific data had to wait for IS-generated reports, which could take more than three weeks. This new ability to autonomously access data allows managers to gain competitive advantage by gauging market fluctuations, analyzing purchasing patterns, and spotting market opportunities Additionally, inventory managers can now access historical customer and sales data stored in the data warehouse to effectively plan inventory and purchasing. "We needed a tool that would allow our business managers to get information that they need using their own business language," said Vincent Benenati, Simon & Schuster Director of IS, Elementary Education Division. "BUSINESSOBJECTS provided the best technology to shield our users from the technical data schema of the database, and backed up its technology with a solid, market-leading company." The Elementary Education Division chose BUSINESSOBJECTS over a number of query and reporting and relational on-line analytical processing (database) On-Line Analytical Processing - (OLAP) A category of database software which provides an interface such that users can transform or limit raw data according to user-defined or pre-defined functions, and quickly and interactively examine the results in various dimensions (OLAP (OnLine Analytical Processing) Decision support software that allows the user to quickly analyze information that has been summarized into multidimensional views and hierarchies. OLAP tools are used to perform trend analysis on sales and financial information. ) tools. The Elementary Education Division needed to deliver a decision support solution to its business managers as IS time was increasingly consumed with executing requests for ad hoc For this purpose. Meaning "to this" in Latin, it refers to dealing with special situations as they occur rather than functions that are repeated on a regular basis. See ad hoc query and ad hoc mode. data extracts from business users who needed information outside of the division's paper-based, standardized mainframe reports. Dave Cappelucci, senior vice president and business manager for Simon & Schuster's Elementary Education Division, said, "Our vision is to deliver all of the information our users need to effectively do their jobs directly to their desktop, and BUSINESSOBJECTS and the data warehouse are an important part of this vision." The Elementary Education Division's data warehouse holds 10 years of historical customer and sales information. Each week, data is downloaded from Simon & Schuster's production systems into a Sybase relational database relational database Database in which all data are represented in tabular form. The description of a particular entity is provided by the set of its attribute values, stored as one row or record of the table, called a tuple. , which acts as the data warehouse. End users access the datawarehouse using BUSINESSOBJECTS on Windows 3.1 and Macintosh on IBM's RS/6000. Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster is the world's largest educational publisher and is a division of Viacom Inc. Business Objects Business Objects (NASDAQ NASDAQ in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on : BOBJY) is a leading provider of enterprise decision support tools that delivers access to data stored in corporate databases, data warehouses, and packaged applications. The company pioneered the market for business-intelligent decision support tools in 1990 with the introduction of its flagship product A primary product of a company, which is typically why the company was founded and/or what made it well known. For example, MS-DOS, Windows and the Microsoft Office suite have been flagship products of Microsoft. CorelDRAW is a flagship product of Corel Corporation. , BUSINESSOBJECTS, the first decision support tool to use a "semantic layer" to map complex database schemas to a business representation understandable by mainstream business users. Business Objects generated over $60M in revenue in 1995, concluding its fifth consecutive year of more than 100% revenue growth. BUSINESSOBJECTS has been licensed in more than 50 countries to over 2,900 customer sites and 160,000 users worldwide. Business Objects partners with leading third-party vendors including Hewlett-Packard, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Informix, Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Prism, Red Brick, Sun, and Sybase. Strategic resellers include Bull, Digital, Fujitsu, NCR (NCR Corporation, Dayton, OH, www.ncr.com) A technology company specializing in financial terminal transactions, retail systems and data warehousing. Until the late 1990s, NCR was heavily invested in the hardware side of the industry, known worldwide as a major manufacturer of computers , Price Waterhouse, Sequent, SHL SHL Shift Logical Left SHL Schweizerische Hochschule für Landwirtschaft (German: Swiss College of Agriculture) SHL Southern Hockey League SHL Silver Haired Legislature SHL Single Hidden Layer (neural networks) , Siemens Nixdorf, and Unisys. -0- Note to Editors: BUSINESSOBJECTS is a trademark of Business Objects S.A. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. CONTACT: Business Objects Tracy Eiler, 408/973-9300 or Blanc & Otus Danielle Dawson, 415/512-0500 |
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