Business Objects Releases New Data Integration Products

Business Wire, August 26, 2002

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 26, 2002

Provides Industry's First Best-of-Breed Application Delivery

Platform for Deploying End-to-End Business Intelligence

Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ)(Euronext Paris: Euroclear code 12074), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced the availability of BusinessObjects(TM) Data Integrator and BusinessObjects Rapid Marts(TM). The products are the first to result from the company's acquisition of Acta Technology, Inc., a leading data integration vendor. (Editor's note: please see related press release "Business Objects Completes Acquisition of Acta Technology, Inc.," dated August 26, 2002).

The combination of Acta's visionary data integration technology with the industry's leading business intelligence solutions from Business Objects provides organizations with the means for deploying integrated end-to-end business intelligence, from data extraction to analytic applications, while maintaining independence from operational systems. This gives customers a unique best-of-breed application delivery platform where all components are comprised of industry-leading technology and can be purchased and deployed together or individually.

"The ability to rapidly capture, report, and analyze key enterprise data is critical to our business," said Carsten Ribbe, Project Manager, MIS, for Samsung Data Systems, America. "The Business Objects end-to-end solution enables us to provide timely access to information and powerful reporting and analysis capabilities to our sales, marketing, and inventory staff."

BusinessObjects(TM) Data Integrator is the industry's first real-time and batch data integration tool designed to simplify and accelerate data movement and data sharing across the enterprise. It provides organizations with easy and powerful data access, integration, and delivery, cutting the cost and time required to transform data into meaningful information for the enterprise.

With Data Integrator, customers have high-performance enterprise-class technology that enables them to more quickly and easily build the data integration required to reconcile and consolidate data across multiple disparate sources, and to leverage that data across all their business intelligence initiatives. This means organizations save deployment time and money, quickly turning data into a corporate asset and realizing a faster return on investment (ROI).

In addition, Data Integrator provides more than 40 interfaces to access data in packaged applications, databases, technology standards, and mainframes. These interfaces connect to sources such as PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle, SAP, XML, IBM MQSeries, Web Services, and SOAP.

BusinessObjects Rapid Marts(TM) are packaged solutions for building data marts for business intelligence and analytic applications, enabling IT to accelerate time to value for data integration projects and get more value out of their operational systems. Rapid Marts draw on best practices and years of domain expertise to deliver pre-built data models, transformation logic, and data flows for delivering data from enterprise applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and J.D. Edwards.

As packaged operational applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM), are optimized to capture transactions rather than for data analysis, it is often difficult for end users to retrieve and analyze the data from these valuable information sources. Rapid Marts solve this problem by providing a flexible packaged solution for quickly gaining access to the most valuable data held in enterprise applications and transforming it into meaningful, useful information. This means that organizations can more rapidly deploy BI systems that will lead to better decisions and ensure a better return on their operational systems investments.

"We're extremely pleased to offer our customers the combination of Acta's first-class data integration technology and our market leading tools and analytic applications," said Bernard Liautaud, chief executive officer at Business Objects. "We now provide the industry's first complete, best-of-breed application delivery platform empowering our customers with easy access to more meaningful information and more business value than ever before. "

Liautaud continued: "In addition to offering our own data integration components, we continue to support integration with third-party ETL tools. This underscores our commitment to providing the easiest to use and most robust BI offering, while giving customers the freedom to continue to work with their technology of choice."

Professional Services

Alongside the new products, Business Objects will introduce a new data integration practice as part of its Professional Services capabilities. With consultants located around the world, Business Objects can provide a customer with industry-leading technology for the movement of data between disparate systems, while also ensuring that a data integration environment is quickly and effectively established at customer sites in any geography. In addition, to help organizations fully leverage the features and functionality made available to them, Business Objects will provide extensive and detailed education on all products at regional learning centers and customer sites, or via distance learning.