Business Objects and Informatica First to Deliver Integrated Decision Support Metadata; Delivering Integration And Commitment To Informatica's MX Architecture Extends Partnership Between Data Warehouse Leaders

Business Wire, Feb 26, 1997

ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 26, 1997--Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJY), the world's leading provider of integrated query, reporting, and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools, and Informatica Corp., the Enterprise Data Mart Company(TM), today announced that they are the first to deliver integrated decision support metadata to customers building data warehouses and data marts.

The joint integration work builds on the strategic alliance between the two companies, which began in early 1996. Informatica's PowerMart and BusinessObjects 4.0 are industry-leading products and have been tapped by Microsoft, Digital, and Sybase as key products in their respective data mart offerings.

Business Objects is announcing its support for Informatica's Metadata Exchange (MX) Architecture, an open framework designed to provide end users with a seamless, desktop view of all the information in a corporate data warehouse or data mart.

Informatica helps companies get data marts built more quickly. Business Objects gives end users access to information in data marts and data warehouses. The metadata integration between the two companies will help customers get their data marts built and deployed much faster.

For example, IS professionals will be able to more effectively maintain and manage the data warehouse and data mart, and be relieved from providing end users with ad hoc reports. End users will be able to access more reliable data. Informatica provides a rich set of metadata that BusinessObjects can use, thus speeding the development of a decision support system (DSS) solution.

"The integration of technical and business metadata is essential to helping customers understand the historical information from which they're basing critical business decisions," said Guarav Dhillon, CEO of Informatica. "It's a huge challenge, and one that requires vendors to work together. From the start, Informatica has had a strong alliance with Business Objects, and we're pleased that they have stepped up to tackle this challenge with us."

"We see this integration as an important development in an already strong partnership between two industry leaders," said Bernard Liautaud, president and CEO of Business Objects. "Business Objects and Informatica have already been successfully working together in delivering data mart solutions. The MX Architecture will extend this partnership by providing repository and desktop metadata integration, and giving end users a new way of seeing a business representation of corporate data."

Benefits of the Integration between BusinessObjects and Informatica

Informatica metadata contains critical information beyond the simple table and field names typically provided by a relational database management system (RDBMS) data dictionary. Thus the speed of building a business-intelligent front end to the data warehouse or data mart implementation is greatly enhanced.

For example, via the integration, BusinessObjects accesses Informatica's subject areas, high-level logical groupings of data organized by subject areas such as manufacturing or human resources, rather than looking at the entire database. This makes it easier to filter out extraneous tables and columns and work with only relevant parts of the database.

Informatica metadata also contains critical information about versions, transformation algorithms, the data warehouse source and target tables and columns, mappings between sources and targets, and scheduling of data movement sessions, making it much easier for the IS professional setting up BusinessObjects to understand the contents of the entire warehouse.

About Informatica

Informatica Corporation, located in Menlo Park, Calif., is the leading provider of software for designing and managing line-of-business and enterprise data marts. The company was founded in 1993 with a vision to help companies quickly benefit from industrial-strength data warehousing by providing software that accelerated warehouse implementation, improves price/performance and expands flexibility.

Informatica's PowerMart suite was recently recognized by InformationWeek as one of the "Important Products of the Year" for 1996, and by Database Programming & Design as a database industry influence to watch in 1997.

About Business Objects

Business Objects (NASDAQ:BOBJY) is the world's leading provider of integrated enterprise decision support tools. Business Objects products provide non-technical business users with access to information stored in corporate data warehouses, data marts, and packaged business applications. The company pioneered the modern decision support market in 1990 by introducing the "semantic layer," a patented technology that maps complex databases to a business representation understandable by non-technical end users.

The company's award-winning products include BusinessObjects, the first integrated query, reporting, and online analytical processing (OLAP) tool; BusinessQuery, the first Microsoft Excel add-in to provide a business representation of data; and BusinessMiner, the first data mining tool positioned for the mainstream business user. Oracle users recently voted BusinessObjects the best DSS/OLAP tool in the Oracle Technical Journal's annual best product awards.