Business Objects Announces Data Mining Partnership With ISoft; Leading Decision Support Tools Vendor Partners with ISoft to Provide Customers with Link Between BusinessObjects and AC2

Business Wire, May 20, 1996

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 20, 1996--Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJY), the world's leading provider of integrated query, reporting, and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools, today announced a partnership with ISoft.

ISoft joins Business Objects Open Data Mining Initiative partner program, and Business Objects will provide mutual customers with a link between the companies' two products that will allow users to launch ISoft's product AC2 from within BusinessObjects. This link is available immediately, and will be provided by Business Objects to customers at no charge.

One-button integration with ISoft will now make it easier than ever for users to combine the benefits of data mining with the powerful query, reporting, and OLAP capabilities of BusinessObjects. Data mining extends customers' decision support capabilities by helping users to discover hidden trends and relationships in their data and to make predictions using that information.

ISoft's AC2 and Alice are high profile data mining products for exploring databases through interactive decision trees and creating queries, reports, charts, and even rules for predictive models. Since its first release in 1990, AC2 has emerged in the European market as a highly successful data mining tool on the Unix and PC platforms. Available in 1996, Alice introduces major breakthroughs in terms of user-friendliness for data mining on the PC.

"We are pleased to be partnering with ISoft, and to offer our customers the ability to connect to AC2 through BusinessObjects," said Bernard Liautaud, president and CEO of Business Objects. "Our partnership will allow customers to take advantage of BusinessObjects for integrated query, reporting, and OLAP, and AC2 for further data mining functions such as decision trees and predictive modeling."

"AC2 and Alice identify the pieces of information that are specific to the user's problem. Once the data has been located, using BusinessObjects will dramatically enhance AC2 and Alice users' ability to navigate within the information," said Herve Perdrix, president and CEO of ISoft. "Combining our two products makes for a much more efficient decision making process, as we are now able to provide our customers with a comprehensive and integrated decision support software environment."

About ISoft

ISoft has been a major provider of data mining solutions for the past six years, providing leading edge tools and applications to the most demanding data owners throughout Europe. The company's product, AC2 and Alice enable all a variety of decision makers to easily locate key information within corporate databases and save time while improving decision accuracy. AC2's unique "knowledge modeling" feature translates complex information into easily understood graphical models. Launching Alice in 1996, ISoft now makes the power of data mining available to every desktop PC user.

ISoft's products are available from ISoft and a worldwide network of local resellers and VARs, including Bull. Other partners and users include Mitre Corporation (defense industry), Finaref-La Redoute (retail and mail order business), and the French Bank La Caisse d'Epargne.

About Business Objects

Business Objects (NASDAQ:BOBJY) is the world's leading supplier of integrated query, reporting, and OLAP tools. The company's flagship product, BusinessObjects, provides mainstream business users with access to information stored in corporate databases, data warehouses, and packaged applications. The company pioneered the market for business-intelligent decision support tools in 1990 by introducing the first product to use a "semantic layer" to map complex database schemas to a business representation understandable by non-technical end users.

Business Objects generated over $60M in revenue in 1995, concluding its fifth consecutive year of more than 100 percent 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 more than 350 leading third-party vendors. More information on Business Objects can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.businessobjects.com. -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.

-- Inquiries for Business Objects product information should call: 800/527-0580 or contact the company through the Web at http:\\www.businessobjects.com.

-- See other releases today on Business Objects data mining partnerships

CONTACT: Business Objects

Tracy Eiler or Miriam Standish, 408/973-9300

teiler@busobj.com

mstandis@busobj.com

or

Blanc & Otus

Danielle Dawson, 415/512-0500

ddawson@bando.com