Business Objects Open Portal Initiative Positions Company as Leading Business Intelligence Content Provider for Enterprise Information Portals.

Business Editors and High Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 6, 2000

Initiative to Integrate BUSINESSOBJECTS INFOVIEW with EIP

Frameworks and Services for Seamless Access to Structured Data

Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJ), the world's leading provider of e-business intelligence (e-BI) solutions, today announced the Business Objects open portal initiative (OPI). The open portal initiative is a partner program whereby Business Objects is working with leading enterprise information portal (EIP) vendors to provide customers with a complete end-to-end, content-rich portal solution.

Business Objects provides a business intelligence portal, named BUSINESSOBJECTS(TM) INFOVIEW, that collects and consolidates a company's business intelligence (BI) information and presents it in a secure, focused, and personalized view to business users. (Editor's note: please see related press release titled "Business Objects Announces BUSINESSOBJECTS INFOVIEW" dated May 2, 2000).

EIPs unite business content and applications into a single, browser-based interface. By partnering with Business Objects, EIP vendors can provide seamless access to structured data, including BI content such as corporate reports, Microsoft(R) Office documents, Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files, and spreadsheets within their portal.

Open Portal Initiative Partners

For its open portal initiative, Business Objects is partnering with EIP vendors IBM, Plumtree Software, and Viador. Business Objects is also working with Braun Consulting, a leading IT consulting firm in the portal market.

IBM

IBM Enterprise Information Portal is the foundation of a company-wide software strategy designed to help corporations leverage the information supporting today's e-business applications. It lets business users personalize data queries, search extensively for very specific needs, and utilize relevant results--from across an unrivaled number of IBM and non-IBM data sources, both traditional and multimedia.

"IBM's Enterprise Information Portal, as the foundation for building e-portal applications, combined with BUSINESSOBJECTS INFOVIEW, provides our mutual customers with a powerful means to access and search an enormous variety of business information," said Jim Kelly, vice president of marketing for IBM Data Management Solutions. "Together we are providing customers with powerful e-business decision-making capabilities made possible by the unification and leveraging of information from business intelligence and a wide variety of other data sources."

Plumtree Software

For the initial phase of the OPI, corporate portal vendor Plumtree Software plans to integrate key features from BUSINESSOBJECTS INFOVIEW and WEBINTELLIGENCE(R) with the Plumtree Corporate Portal as Plumtree Portal Gadgets(TM). Similar in appearance to the sports scoreboard or stock portfolio that appears in a consumer portal, Plumtree Portal Gadgets represent enterprise application components or internet services. The BUSINESSOBJECTS Gadgets, which are available to Plumtree and Business Objects customers at http://gadgets.plumtree.com, include:

--   My WEBINTELLIGENCE Document List: provides users the ability to
     view both full-client and thin-client documents from their
     personalized portal page, called MyPage. The user can then
     organize documents by the inbox, and corporate and personal
     groups.

--   WEBINTELLIGENCE Single Sign-On: allows users to store their
     username and password for WEBINTELLIGENCE inside their Plumtree
     user preferences. Upon login to the corporate portal, the welcome
     frame for WEBINTELLIGENCE will appear in users' front pages,
     allowing for single sign-on to WEBINTELLIGENCE.

--   My WEBINTELLIGENCE Reports: provides users the ability to place a
     graphical WEBINTELLIGENCE report on their MyPage. Users can
     choose other reports by choosing from a list maintained on their
     MyPage. The report data will be refreshed so users will always be
     viewing the latest data when the document is accessed.

--   My WEBINTELLIGENCE Alert: allows users to create thresholds based
     information within a WEBINTELLIGENCE report. If that threshold is
     exceeded, an "alert" message will appear; otherwise, a standard
     "OK" message appears. In both cases, users are provided with an
     updated report status and can make more informed business
     decisions.

"Plumtree is pleased to be a part of the Business Objects OPI to extend our business intelligence application integration and offer our customers an additional choice," said John Kunze, CEO of Plumtree Software. "The BUSINESSOBJECTS Gadget suite provides efficient access to robust business intelligence functionality. Now our joint customers can easily integrate their BUSINESSOBJECTS content into their enterprise-wide Plumtree Corporate Portal deployments."

Viador

Viador's enterprise information portal serves as an open framework that facilitates the rapid deployment of e-business solutions by encapsulating e-business applications, business information sources, and internet content within the Viador portal. Viador's E-Portal Framework(TM) is the foundation upon which Global 1000, emerging internet companies, independent software providers, application service providers, and system integrators can deploy a wide variety of e-business applications including: business-to-business (B2B) portals and business-to-employee (B2E) portals. Viador integrates all application components and provides a scaleable, customizable delivery vehicle for deploying e-business solutions faster and at less cost.

"Today's enterprise needs a way to leverage all of their existing information assets and training to rapidly transition to the world of e-business," said Stan Wang, president and CEO of Viador. "Viador's EIP helps fast moving businesses quickly integrate information and application assets into user-personalized portals that can scale for worldwide operations. Since BUSINESSOBJECTS is one of the most widely used business intelligence solutions in the world, supporting them as a BI content provider for our EIP solution demonstrates our commitment to open integration of all types of solutions."

Viador is working toward offering tight integration between its EIP and the client/server and web versions of Business Objects solutions. Viador expects that EIP users will be able to access BUSINESSOBJECTS INFOVIEW to see BI content as well as access unstructured document data and news information, all with one click from a user-personalized business portal start page. Viador expects its security and user-defined privileges to be coupled with BUSINESSOBJECTS, enabling single sign-on and control access privileges with WEBINTELLIGENCE.

Once the integration is complete, Viador expects that users will be able to automatically retrieve and submit Business Objects reports and documents so users can distribute them via their channel, folder, and inbox capabilities. Dashboard-like interfaces may be easily created using the Viador PageBuilder to rapidly assemble Business Objects reports and charts and combine them with other data sources enabling cross-system views of information.

Braun Consulting

"For an information portal to be successful in a company, it must create a single point of access to data buried within the organization. Unfortunately, it's a very complex process to integrate disparate security, administrative, and application systems into a single, web-based presentation layer," said Steve Miller, executive vice president of Braun Consulting. "We make this possible by leveraging our technological know-how to create a smooth integration of BI content from BUSINESSOBJECTS INFOVIEW into EIP environments, creating an end-to-end portal solution."

"The enterprise portals market is a rapidly evolving space, and as such presents new business and technology architectures. As the industry's top e-business intelligence vendor, Business Objects is serving as the leading BI content provider in the enterprise portal space," said Crispin Read, senior director of product marketing at Business Objects. "We choose to focus on our core competency of providing e-business intelligence content, while opening our system for easy integration with enterprise information portals."

About Business Objects

Business Objects is the world's leading provider of e-business intelligence (e-BI) solutions. The company coined the term e-business intelligence in 1998 to describe the intersection of business intelligence and the internet. Using e-business intelligence, organizations can access, analyze, and share information in intranet, extranet, and e-business environments. In intranets, the company's products provide employees with information to make better business decisions, and are used in environments ranging from workgroups of 20 users to enterprise deployments exceeding 20,000. In the extranet environment, the company is pioneering the use of e-BI in applications that allow organizations to build stronger relationships by linking customers, partners, and suppliers via the internet. In addition, the company's products can improve the performance of an e-business by providing reporting and analysis against the ever-expanding amount of transaction and profile data that is collected each day throughout the world wide web.

Founded in 1990, Business Objects pioneered the modern business intelligence industry by inventing and patenting a "semantic layer" that insulates users from the technical complexity of database systems. Today, the company has sold more than 1,910,000 licenses to over 10,200 organizations in more than 80 countries. The company's stock is publicly traded under the ticker symbols NASDAQ: BOBJ and PARIS BOURSE: code SICOVAM 12074, and included in the SBF 120 and IT CAC 50 French stock market indexes. Business Objects can be reached at 408-953-6000 and www.businessobjects.com.

Those trademarks followed by ((R)) are registered trademarks of IBM in the United States; all others are trademarks of IBM in the United States. Plumtree Corporate Portal, Plumtree Portal Gadgets, and Active Portal are registered trademarks of Plumtree Software, Inc. Yahoo! is a registered trademark of Yahoo, Inc. Viador, the Viador E-Portal Suite, Viador B2B E-Portal, Viador Sage, Viador Information Center, Viador Gateway, Viador Sentinel, Viador PageBuilder, Viador PortletBuilder, Viador Portlet, Viador E-Portal Framework, and the Viador PDK, are trademarks of Viador Inc. of Mountain View, California. BUSINESSOBJECTS is a trademark of Business Objects SA. WEBINTELLIGENCE is a registered trademark of Business Objects SA. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

A full-text copy of this announcement may be obtained by calling the Company's fax retrieval line at 800-414-2114 and selecting option "two." The announcement may also be downloaded from the web; access http://www.businesswire.com/cnn and search on "Business Objects." Business Objects product inquiries should contact 800-527-0580.