Information Builders Releases WebFOCUS Magnify, a Service-Oriented Approach to Search Technology.

Industry's First BI Search Tool Improves Relevancy of Results by Leveraging Metadata for Dynamic Categorization and Guided Navigation

NEW YORK -- Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today announced the release of WebFOCUS Magnify[TM], the industry's first search navigation tool that dynamically categorizes search results and supplements them with analysis and reporting capabilities. Magnify uses the metadata from Google or other search engines to index structured data records and provide access to all WebFOCUS capabilities through the search interface. This dramatically improves the user experience, providing dramatically improved relevancy of results and reducing time spend searching for information need to do their jobs effectively.

The amount of time wasted by workers searching for information is astounding. According to a recent study of 1,009 managers at U.S. and U.K. companies with annual revenue of more than $500 million, Accenture found that the average middle manager spends about two hours a day looking for data, and IT managers spend 30 percent of their time trying to pin down information relevant to their jobs.1 Similarly, BusinessWeek reported that across enterprises the average time spent on searching for information has increased 1.1 hours per week per employee from 10.9 hours to 12.0 hours. The report also concluded that what the industry needed was a service-oriented approach to search technology that is configurable to the varied needs of enterprises and users.2

A unique feature of WebFOCUS Magnify is that it captures data on a message bus. Using standard integration technology from iWay Software - an Information Builders company - it enriches the messages, adds metatags, and submits it to the search engine indexing mechanism. This avoids the need for crawling data stores, particularly database records, combining structured data in databases with unstructured search. WebFOCUS Magnify leverages the metatags and provides results in a navigation tree to guide users to the information they need. This is especially valuable when relevancy ordering puts what is wanted far from the first page.

The index flows inherent in iWay work behind the scenes to help enhance the search experience by delivering more relevant, meaningful content. WebFOCUS Magnify offers immediate, at-your-fingertips retrieval of information that improves a user's ability to make decisions.

Features of WebFOCUS Magnify include:

-- Dynamic categorization of search results - provides enhanced ways
   to narrow down your search such as:
    -- Category distribution to see which categories have the
       highest/lowest search results
    -- Guided navigation to filter by intelligently generated
       categories
    -- Breadcrumbs to know exactly how search results were achieved
       and be able to return to any previous search state with one
       click
-- Search-driven parameterized reports - combines search with
   parameterized reporting, which doubles the BI power available to
   the untrained user
-- Dynamic directories - uses search to data mine; records can be
   searched behind the scenes to construct a ranked directory listing
-- Search engine agnostic - can work with Lucene and Google

"We have developed a product that answers the woes of the all users in organizations wondering why they waste so much time searching for the data they need to do their jobs better and not being able to get the results they need," said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "Magnify turns the traditional search model on its head and provides users the ability to perform not only the search but also analysis on the search using Active Reports. This innovation will reduce the time users spend browsing and searching for results by two thirds."

About Information Builders

An industry innovator for more than 31 years, Information Builders is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product - the industry's most secure and flexible - is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS' empowerment of organizations seeking to leverage all their data by accessing it all - from legacy to data warehouse - is unmatched.

Information Builders' award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services for 31 years to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,600 people and has over 350 business partners. For more information visit www.informationbuilders.com.

1 McGee, M. InformationWeek. "Managers Have Too Much Information, Do Too Little Sharing." January 8, 2007

2 Strohlein, M. BusinessWeek. "Executive Guide to Enterprise Search." May 15, 2006.