Business Objects Announces BusinessObjects Enterprise 6.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 23, 2003 Industry's Leading Suite of Integrated Business Intelligence Products Establishes New Standards in Functionality and Integration Business Objects, (Nasdaq:BOBJ BOBJ Business Objects SA ), the leading provider of business intelligence solutions, today announced BusinessObjects(TM) Enterprise 6, the new version of its industry-leading BI suite that enables organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise performance. Enterprise 6 offers four key advantages over all other business intelligence suites on the market today: it provides the industry's best web query, reporting, and analysis; the most advanced and complete suite of analytic applications; the best connectivity to packaged applications; and is the most integrated BI suite. Enterprise 6 is the company's suite of integrated business intelligence products comprising enterprise analytic applications, a business intelligence platform, and data integration products. Enterprise 6 provides organizations with one integrated, functionally complete BI environment for all users, from the casual report viewer to the report author to the data analyst, and ensures compatibility between all elements of the BI suite. "Today's announcement marks a very important milestone for the company," said Bernard Liautaud, chairman and chief executive officer of Business Objects. "Enterprise 6 builds on our extraordinary history of innovation and sets the new benchmark for integrated business intelligence suites. I would like to thank our thousands of customers who over the years have deployed our products and have been instrumental in helping us evolve our core solutions to become the standard in business intelligence." Enterprise 6 boasts new and updated products and a host of improved functionality, specifically: a brand new version of WebIntelligence(R), an enhanced BI portal, a new enterprise data warehouse, end-to-end metadata integration, increased scalability and performance, and improved infrastructure and administration. WebIntelligence 6.0: the most powerful web query, reporting, and analysis product on the market As BI deployments have evolved, many users have matured beyond simple report viewing and want to create, edit, and analyze reports in detail over the web. In addition, users outside the organization must be able to access information via extranets. With WebIntelligence(R) 6.0, customers benefit from the most sophisticated web-based BI product on the market, combining powerful functionality and easy to use features for all levels of users. In addition, unlike other tools on the market, WebIntelligence 6.0 provides a single web-based product for ad-hoc query, enterprise reporting, and analysis. Notable new features in WebIntelligence 6.0 include: -- Multi-block reports, -- Sophisticated user-defined calculations, -- Synchronized multi-block navigation, -- Report component templates, -- Zero-footprint hypertext markup language (hypertext, World-Wide Web, standard) Hypertext Markup Language - (HTML) A hypertext document format used on the World-Wide Web. HTML is built on top of SGML. "Tags" are embedded in the text. A tag consists of a "<", a "directive" (in lower case), zero or more parameters and a ">". (HTML HTML in full HyperText Markup Language Markup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. ) report creation, and -- An option to save or publish richly formatted reports to Microsoft Excel and Adobe Acrobat. "We selected Business Objects because they are the leader in business intelligence extranets, and we are constantly looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. ways to use the web to improve our level of service to our constituents," said Randy Mellin, CIO CIO: see American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. (Chief Information Officer) The executive officer in charge of information processing in an organization. , Workers' Compensation workers' compensation, payment by employers for some part of the cost of injuries, or in some cases of occupational diseases, received by employees in the course of their work. Insurance Rating Bureau of California. "With Enterprise 6, Business Objects is building on their strength in web-based business intelligence. This will allow our constituents to do more with the information we give them, and strengthen our relationships with our key partners and clients." Enhanced BI portal simplifies organization of critical corporate information Information technology (IT) managers understand the importance of providing users with an easy and powerful entry point into relevant business information. BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 delivers a significantly enhanced BI portal, making it easier for users of all levels to quickly find the information they need to do their jobs. Enterprise 6 includes new end user analysis functions such as interactive sorting and filtering, easier document navigation, and one click personalization. IT staff will benefit by leveraging customizable active server page See ASP. (ASP) and java server page (JSP (JavaServer Page) An extension to the Java servlet technology from Sun that allows HTML to be combined with Java on the same page. The Java provides the processing, and the HTML provides the layout on the Web page. ) interfaces and portal skins that enable quicker corporate customization of the BI portal. Furthermore, organizations can continue to rapidly integrate valuable BI content into their enterprise information portals. Enterprise analytic applications powered by new BusinessObjects Warehouse Enterprise 6 includes the BusinessObjects Warehouse, a modular enterprise data warehouse that collects data from disparate systems and makes it usable for business intelligence across the enterprise. The warehouse is populated by connectors powered by BusinessObjects Data Integrator Business Objects's Data Integrator is a data integration and ETL tool that was previously known as Acta. The Data Integrator product consists primarily of a Data Integrator Job Server and the Data Integrator Designer. and includes embedded best practices and data warehousing experience. This greatly reduces the time needed to build and deploy analytic applications and accelerates time to BI value, while ensuring that all users are working from a consistent view of information and thus have one version of the truth across the enterprise. Connectivity to packaged applications and end-to-end metadata management Organizations are moving beyond departmental BI applications to connect all areas of the enterprise, including sales, marketing, finance, products, and supply chain. This requires a common data platform that provides a consistent view of the business from every department. As part of Enterprise 6, BusinessObjects Data Integrator uses native interfaces to extract data from packaged enterprise resource planning See ERP. (application, business) Enterprise Resource Planning - (ERP) Any software system designed to support and automate the business processes of medium and large businesses. (ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) An integrated information system that serves all departments within an enterprise. Evolving out of the manufacturing industry, ERP implies the use of packaged software rather than proprietary software written by or for one customer. ), customer relationship management (CRM (Customer Relationship Management) An integrated information system that is used to plan, schedule and control the presales and postsales activities in an organization. ), and supply chain management (SCM (1) (Software Configuration Management, Source Code Management) See configuration management. (2) See supply chain management. ) applications such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel, as well as custom applications. Data Integrator then quickly integrates and transforms this data to enable analysis and reporting across the enterprise. In addition, BI users need consistent and timely feeds of data from source operational systems. Enterprise 6 provides easy metadata management including real-time alerts from operational systems out to enterprise management dashboards. Increased scalability and performance translate to more powerful BI BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 features a more efficient architecture, specifically a new connection pooling process, a new login server, a faster full client calculation engine, a multi-threaded report engine, and page-by-page report generation. This provides faster report generation, calculations, and other system-intensive activities. As a result, Enterprise 6 provides significant performance and scalability gains over previous product releases. Improved infrastructure and administration provide easier installation, deployment, and maintenance BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 streamlines the configuration and installation process providing easier setup, deployment, and maintenance of the BI system. In addition, with a new reporting software developer kit (SDK (Software Developer's Kit) See developer's toolkit and Windows SDK. SDK - Software Developers Kit (or "Software Development Kit"). ) and a new security SDK, Enterprise 6 makes it easier for partners and customers to incorporate Business Objects functionality into their own applications and extranets, extending BI deployments to more users. Enterprise 6 also features integration with software management systems, enhanced metadata validation, and an improved administration console. Customer Response BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 has been tested and evaluated by more than 100 customers worldwide, including: Banque de France Banque de France National bank of France, created in 1800 to restore confidence in the French banking system after the financial upheavals of the revolutionary period. Napoleon was one of its founding shareholders. BNP Paribas British Airways Cisco Systems EDS (Electronic Data Systems, Plano, TX, www.eds.com) Founded in 1962 by H. Ross Perot (independent candidate for the President of the U.S. in 1992), EDS is the largest outsourcing and data processing services organization in the country. France Telecom Hitachi SAS (1) (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, www.sas.com) A software company that specializes in data warehousing and decision support software based on the SAS System. Founded in 1976, SAS is one of the world's largest privately held software companies. See SAS System. Infineon Ingram Micro MasterCard NEC (NEC Corporation, Tokyo, www.nec.com, www.necus.com) An electronics conglomerate known in the U.S. for its monitors. In Japan, it had the lion's share of the PC market until the late 1990s (see PC 98). NEC was founded in Tokyo in 1899 as Nippon Electric Company, Ltd. 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 Owens & Minor Rhodia 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. STMicroelectronics Swiss Re Unisys Customers wanting to learn more about BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 are invited to join a live web seminar titled First Look: A BI Breakthrough Revealed, to be held Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 10:00am PDT PDT abbr. Pacific Daylight Time PDT Pacific Daylight Time PDT n abbr (US) (= Pacific Daylight Time) → hora de verano del Pacífico PDT . To register, go to www.businessobjects.com/e6_webinar. In addition, data sheets and product brochures can be accessed by going to www.businessobjects.com/enterprise6/. Availability BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 is in production on Windows. It will be generally available on Windows and HP UX, 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) AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) IBM's Unix-based operating system which runs on its Intellistation workstations and pSeries, p5, iSeries and i5 server families. , and Sun Solaris by May 15, 2003. About Business Objects Business Objects is the world's leading provider of enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions. Business Objects enables organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise performance. The company's solutions leverage the information that is stored in an array of corporate databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Popular uses of BI include management dashboards and scorecards, enterprise performance management applications, customer intelligence applications, enterprise reporting, financial reporting, and both customer and partner extranets. These solutions enable companies to gain visibility into their business, acquire and retain profitable customers, reduce costs, optimize the supply chain, increase productivity and improve financial performance. Business Objects provides the industry's most integrated business intelligence suite, called BusinessObjects Enterprise 6. This suite includes the industry's best web query, reporting, and analysis; the most advanced and complete suite of analytic applications; and the best connectivity to packaged applications. Business Objects has more than 17,500 customers in over 80 countries. The company's stock is publicly traded under the ticker symbols NASDAQ: BOBJ and Euronext Paris (Euroclear code 12074). It is included in the SBF SBF Studium Biblicum Franciscanum (Franciscan School of Biblical Investigations; Jerusalem, Israel) SBF Small Block Ford (automotive engine) SBF Single Black Female SBF Société des Bourses Francaises 120 and IT CAC See Consumer Advisory Council. 50 French stock market indexes. Business Objects can be reached at 408/953-6000 and www.businessobjects.com. Safe Harbor Safe Harbor 1. A legal provision to reduce or eliminate liability as long as good faith is demonstrated. 2. A form of shark repellent implemented by a target company acquiring a business that is so poorly regulated that the target itself is less attractive. Statement This press release contains forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements regarding the demand for and expected performance of Enterprise 6. The forward-looking statements are based on the company's current expectations, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. The factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include, but are not limited to, the level of demand for the company's business intelligence solutions, particularly its Enterprise 6 BI suite, changes in customer order patterns, the importance of business intelligence in the business intelligence tools, data integration, and analytic applications markets, continued success in technological advances and the ability of the company to adapt to technological changes, the ability of the company to gain acceptance of its products. For a more complete discussion of these factors and additional risk factors that could materially affect the company's current and future operating results, see the discussions in the company's Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2002 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements at any time or for any reason. Note to Editors: BusinessObjects is a trademark and WebIntelligence is a registered trademark of Business Objects S.A. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. |
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