Business Objects Welcomes Mediapps to the Business Objects Open Portal Initiative.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 24, 2000

The Leading European Corporate Portal Vendor Integrates with BusinessObjects InfoView To Provide Enterprise Portal with e-Business

Intelligence Features and Content

Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ), the world's leading provider of e-business intelligence (e-BI) solutions, today announced that Mediapps has joined the Business Objects open portal initiative. Mediapps is the creator of Net.Portal, a new-generation e-business application used for the dynamic distribution of internal and external information.

Business Objects created the Business Objects open portal initiative (OPI) to provide organizations maximum flexibility in deploying portal solutions throughout their enterprises. As the first part of the company's portal strategy, Business Objects provides BusinessObjects(TM) InfoView, a Business Intelligence portal (BIP) that collects and consolidates a company's business intelligence (BI) information and presents it in a secure, focused, and personalized view to business users. In addition, Business Objects partners with leading enterprise information portal (EIP) vendors, enabling the rich feature set of Business Objects products to be directly and seamlessly integrated into EIP solutions provided by partners and offering customers a wide array of vendors to choose from as they construct their complete end-to-end portal solution.

Net.Portal enables the development of intranet, internet, and extranet portals by aggregating information from databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and company intranets with external content. In addition, Net.Portal facilitates and customizes the distribution of information through corporate intranets or via extranets that integrate customers and suppliers. Users define their own profile and interests, and then receive custom services and information delivery. To date more than 150 large companies have deployed Net.Portal, including Bull, Carl Zeiss, France Telecom, the French Ministry of Finance, Siemens, and ZDNet.

Mediapps also serves as an information intermediary enabling companies to take advantage of more than 30,000 sources of information about business, competitors, stock prices, and procurement notices, including Bloomberg, CNN, Lexis Nexis, Newsedge, and Reuters.

BusinessObjects InfoView and Net.Portal work together to combine internal and external data sources with Business Objects reports and other corporate information including Microsoft(R) Office documents, Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files, and spreadsheets, all presented to users via a single web interface. With this integration, Business Objects reports are displayed as another information source available to users from within Net.Portal. In addition, within the Net.Portal, users can personalize their own interface by choosing the specific content they would like displayed. For example, a user could set up his interface to see a specific BusinessObjects report and a web site with leading stock market indicators when logging on to the system, as well as customize where in the screen that information will appear.

"We are very happy to have Mediapps join our open portal initiative," said Mark Tice, group vice president of global alliances at Business Objects. "This technology partnership enables our joint customers to build end-to-end enterprise portal solutions that include access to BI content and popular external data sources. Both Business Objects and Mediapps bring a tremendous value to the table, and the combination of technologies will provide a first-class portal solution for the enterprise."

"The combination of our technologies allows Business Objects and Mediapps to market an impressive portal offering with e-business intelligence features and content," said Laurent Binard, CEO of Mediapps. "Feedback from customers and partners has been highly positive, and we look forward to continuing our strategic and successful partnership with Business Objects."

Mediapps joins the growing list of established Business Objects EIP partners, which includes IBM, iManage, Plumtree, and Viador, who have chosen to leverage the technology benefits and customer opportunities provided by the Business Objects open portal initiative.

About Mediapps, The Information Aggregator

Mediapps is the creator of the Net.Portal software and is positioned as an infomediary (information intermediary). Mediapps offers businesses the opportunity, via the Internet, to take advantage of more than 30,000 sources, such as economic information, monitoring competitors' sites on the Internet, share prices, and calls for public and private tenders.

The Mediapps company was founded in April 1999 and its head office is in La Defense, Paris. The company also has offices in England, Germany and Spain and is in the process of opening other subsidiaries on the major European markets. The three founding directors of the company are Laurent Binard, Didier Rochereau, and Bertrand Peralta. Mediapps raised 12 million dollars in February 2000 with a second financial package, and is to be floated on the Paris stock exchange in Autumn 2000.

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 over 11,500 customers 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.

Note to Editors: BusinessObjects is a 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.