Business Objects Announces BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager; New Product To Provide Dashboards, Scorecards, and Alerting for Enterprise Performance Management

Business Wire, Jan 29, 2003

Business Editors/High Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 29, 2003

Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ), the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced the general availability of BusinessObjects(TM) Dashboard Manager, a new product for delivering management dashboards, scorecards, and alerting capabilities to the enterprise. Using these capabilities, customers can implement enterprise performance management (EPM) -- the strategic application of business intelligence to improve organizational effectiveness.

BusinessObjects Dashboard Manger provides the ability to create management dashboards, which are at-a-glance displays that show the status of business metrics using easy to understand interface conventions such as gauges. Dashboards built using BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager support popular management methodologies; for example, organizations using Six Sigma can easily add control charts to their dashboards to track if key indicators remain within established tolerances. Users gain broad visibility into the current status of the business, enabling them to track how their organization is performing against its strategic goals and how day-to-day execution is aligned with corporate strategy.

Like dashboards, scorecards provide a view into business performance using interface visuals such as stoplights and trend indicators to monitor larger number of metrics. Using BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, customers can build scorecards and cascade them through their organization to ensure that everyone is aligned to the same goals. Customers can implement balanced scorecards that show performance along four dimensions: financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth. BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager also supports other leading performance methodologies such as activity-based costing, economic value add (EVA), value-based management, and custom management philosophies.

BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager also includes integrated alerting, allowing users to be notified of business issues via dashboards, email, and pagers. This allows metrics to be tracked around the clock, and allows problems to be identified and acted upon as soon as they arise. This alerting capability lets users manage by exception, enabling them to focus on the areas of the business that need attention while knowing that other metrics are continuously monitored for exception conditions.

Using BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, customers can implement enterprise performance management, an emerging application of business intelligence that combines BI, metrics, and methodologies with the goal of improving enterprise performance. According to Gartner, 40 percent of large organizations will have implemented corporate performance management by 2005 (0.7 probability). (Source: Gartner Strategic Planning Assumption 18-8766, "Put Corporate Performance Management to the Test," L. Geishecker and F. Buytendijk, December 2002). Business Objects has numerous customers using its products and services for performance management. (Editors' note: please see related press release, "Customers Worldwide Turn to Business Objects for Enterprise Performance Management," January 29, 2003.)

BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager is part of BusinessObjects Application Foundation, an analytic framework that supports developing and deploying analytic applications. Application Foundation now consists of four products: BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, BusinessObjects Set Analysis, BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis, and BusinessObjects Statistical Process Control (SPC). With Dashboard Manager customers can start building basic dashboards and alerting, and over time increase the analytic depth by adding segmentation, prediction, and statistical analysis from the other products in the Application Foundation framework.

"The alignment of strategy and operations is key to ultimate business success," said Chris Caren, vice president of corporate product marketing at Business Objects. "For years we have been helping customers analyze the key metrics that have a direct impact on their bottom line. Now with the introduction of BusinessObjects Dashboard Manager, we can provide our customers with the leading metrics management product, giving them the ability to more effectively track and manage their business."

About Business Objects

Business Objects is the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions. Business intelligence lets organizations access, analyze, and share information internally with employees and externally with customers, suppliers, and partners. It helps organizations improve operational efficiency, build profitable customer relationships, and develop differentiated product offerings.

The company's products include data integration tools, the industry's leading integrated business intelligence platform, and a suite of enterprise analytic applications. Business Objects is the first to offer a complete BI solution that is composed of best-of-breed components, giving organizations the means to deploy end-to-end BI to the enterprise, from data extraction to analytic applications.