Business Objects Provides Front-End Solution for Silicon Graphics' Internet-Enabled Data Warehouse; Leading Workstation Vendor Utilizes BUSINESSOBJECTS to Deliver Corporate Data Via an Intranet to Employees Worldwide

Business Wire, May 28, 1996

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 28, 1996--Business Objects, the world's leading provider of integrated query, reporting, and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools, today announced that Silicon Graphics has implemented BUSINESSOBJECTS as a front end to its data warehouse, enabling employees worldwide to access corporate data via the Internet.

Silicon Graphics, a leading computer workstation vendor, utilized BUSINESSOBJECTS to develop an innovative decision support solution that leverages the Internet to provide users with access to a wealth of corporate data, allowing them to make better business decisions and give the company a competitive advantage.

Using BUSINESSOBJECTS, over 350 users located in the U.S., Europe, and Asia are able to independently access the data warehouse, which holds corporate sales and marketing data. By developing a corporate Intranet, Silicon Graphics is leveraging the Internet as an inexpensive communications platform behind the security of a firewall, providing its employees worldwide with direct access to the company's data warehouse.

With BUSINESSOBJECTS, users are able to autonomously query data held in the data warehouse at Silicon Graphics headquarters in Mountain View, California, and analyze and report on the data at their desktops, making employees more productive and saving information systems (IS) staff resources. For instance, using BUSINESSOBJECTS an employee can query the data warehouse for a region's latest sales figures. The data is delivered via the corporate Intranet to the user's desktop, where the user can then drill down to sales by division and sales manager. This functionality ensures that users not only receive data for decision support, but that they can use the data in meaningful ways.

Additionally, 600 other Silicon Graphics employees use BUSINESSOBJECTS to query, analyze and report on corporate financial, manufacturing and human resources information stored in other systems.

"BUSINESSOBJECTS is enabling us to leverage current and historical corporate data stored in our data warehouse to make better business decisions across the organization, from executive management to front-line business managers. Our goal was to revolutionize the way our employees access information, focusing on the analysis of information, not the acquisition of data," said Mike Graves, chief information officer (CIO) for Silicon Graphics. "By combining a comprehensive decision support solution with an Intranet approach, we are able to leverage our data warehouse investment and extend the reach of this information worldwide, without making a huge networking investment."

"By partnering with Silicon Graphics to develop this solution, we are demonstrating how companies can successfully tie their decision support investments with Internet initiatives," said Bernard Liautaud, president and CEO of Business Objects. "The Internet provides companies with a ubiquitous platform for delivering decision support to their employees, regardless of where they reside geographically. Silicon Graphics is leading the industry with its innovative implementation of Intranet technology."

In the past, end users throughout Silicon Graphics relied on the IS staff to retrieve and deliver ad hoc information requests, which could take days or weeks to fulfill, greatly lessening the strategic value of the information. Now, using BUSINESSOBJECTS, employees can retrieve, analyze, and report on corporate data, benefiting the business in a number of ways: sales and marketing personnel can analyze customer buying patterns and product mix successes, and perform "what-if" analysis to formulate pricing and promotions; human resources personnel can evaluate the company's hiring and pay practices in order to project appropriate hiring and pay scales for the upcoming quarter. Other users include financial and manufacturing analysts.

About Business Objects

Business Objects (NASDAQ:BOBJY) is the world's leading provider 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% 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 including Arbor Software, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Informix, Microsoft, Oracle, Peoplesoft, Prism, Red Brick, SAP, Sun, and Sybase. Strategic resellers include Bull, Digital, Fujitsu, NCR, Price Waterhouse, Sequent, SHL, Siemens Nixdorf, Toshiba, and Unisys. More information on Business Objects can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.businessobjects.com. -0-