BusinessObjects Deployed by U.S. Department of Energy Richland Operations Office for Major Human Resources Project; Business Objects Continues Success with Federal Customers

Business Wire, Jan 7, 1997

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 7, 1997--Business Objects (NASDAQ:BOBJY), the world's leading provider of integrated query, reporting, and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools today announced that the United States Department of Energy Richland Operations Office (DOE-RL) has successfully deployed BusinessObjects in a major human resources application called RADAR (Rapid Access to Desktop Applications for Resource Management).

RADAR will re-engineer existing work processes with an emphasis on providing quality HR customer support and consulting services to its federal employees. RADAR is using BusinessObjects running on Microsoft SQL Server, PeopleSoft HRMS, and the Internet to create a comprehensive, integrated system that will be an enabling tool to improve the management of the federal workforce.

"We are very excited about our work with the Department of Energy, as it is one more example of our growing success in the federal market," said Bernard Liautaud, president and CEO of Business Objects. "This announcement comes on the heels of the contract we announced last fall with the U.S. Department of Defense, which plans to deploy BusinessObjects to 10,000 users worldwide."

More than 40 federal workers use BusinessObjects for decision support on human resource information, such as forecasting personnel demands for specific operations and analyzing external trends affecting HR resources. Future plans include rolling out BusinessObjects to all DOE-RL managers and employees. With BusinessObjects, end users have easy and timely access to data stored in SQL Server, without requiring the day-to-day involvement of the information systems staff. This has saved the DOE-RL time and money.

"BusinessObjects empowers our HR representatives by enabling them to get reports on their own. This supports the trend in the HR industry of HR representatives becoming more like management consultants," said Cindy Oliver, management analyst at the DOE-RL.

Prior to BusinessObjects, it took up to two to three weeks to fulfill a management request for data. Information systems staff had to pull data from the legacy system and paper files, and turn it over to HR to be reformatted in a word processed file. This time consuming process made the reports out of date, and there was often inaccuracy and inconsistency in the data.

Since deploying BusinessObjects, HR end users can now access and analyze accurate data quickly and easily on their own, without IS intervention. Reports are created in a timely fashion, when the HR staff needs it.

"With BusinessObjects there is a tremendous reduction in time. It only takes a few minutes to run a report and analyze the data," said Oliver.

"We also saved money, as it was such an easy tool to learn. We rolled BusinessObjects out to people who were afraid to use a mouse. We have had a lot of success with BusinessObjects both technically and support wise," said Oliver. "In addition, with BusinessObjects our data is now sanitized, accurate and timely."

RADAR Environment

BusinessObjects enables DOE-RL end users to access HR data from multiple sources, including PeopleSoft HRMS, legacy systems and several other databases. BusinessObjects is used on Windows 95, residing on Microsoft SQL Server.

Together, BusinessObjects and Microsoft Corp. provide the DOE-RL an optimized solution for the decision support marketplace. BusinessObjects was recently selected as the decision support tool in Microsoft's Alliance for Data Warehousing, a framework designed to address the infrastructure for the metadata, administration and data movement required in a data warehousing solution.

As the end user decision support partner, Business Objects will provide end users with integrated query, reporting and OLAP on top of Microsoft(R) SQL Server(TM) data warehousing solutions.

About Business Objects

Business Objects (NASDAQ:BOBJY) is the world's leading supplier of integrated query, reporting and OLAP tools. The company's award-winning 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." This patented technology maps complex database schemas to a business representation understandable by non-technical end users.

Business Objects led the overall decision support tools market in 1995 with software license revenues of $48.7M, and outsold its nearest query and reporting tools competitor two-to-one according to IDC. Business Objects products are in use at over 3,600 organizations in over 60 countries, and the company has sold more than 400,000 licenses worldwide.

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 SA. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.