Business Objects Announces BusinessObjects XI Built for Operational BI; New Solution Strengthens Alignment Between Business Intelligence and Business Operations and Extends Business Intelligence to a Wider Audience

Business Wire, June 6, 2005

SAN JOSE, Calif. & PARIS -- Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ)(Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 -- BOB), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced availability of BusinessObjects(TM) XI Built for Operational BI. The new solution extends the BusinessObjects XI platform and enables embedded analytics, process optimization, and guided decision-making to make BI more useful to more people in an organization. BusinessObjects XI Built for Operational BI is part of a strategic initiative from Business Objects to bring insight to all users in an organization by making BI more process-aware and real-time enabled.

BusinessObjects XI Built for Operational BI provides two new integrated components designed to align BI with business processes -- BusinessObjects Process Tracker and BusinessObjects Process Analysis. Together, these components provide the critical link between performance management and business operations by aligning BI with decision-centric business processes.

BusinessObjects XI Built for Operational BI enables:

--Embedded analytics, by giving more end users across an organization access to the information they need, when they need it, directly in the context of their business processes

--Performance management on an entirely new scale, by combining business process data with alerting capabilities so enterprise performance is linked to operations in real-time

--Guided decision-making, by providing a framework for defining BI best practices and guiding users through effective, repeatable decision-making processes

"BusinessObjects XI Built for Operational BI aligns business objectives to business processes where front-line employees need access to timely, accurate information to make mission-critical decisions every day," said Lance Walter, vice president of worldwide product marketing at Business Objects. In addition, BusinessObjects XI is the only platform that provides the entire spectrum of BI capabilities on a single, integrated platform, and the only platform to deliver these capabilities in an easy to use format that enables more users to take advantage of BI to improve operations."

"Today's announcement just extends our leadership in technology and innovation even further," said Rene Bonvanie, chief marketing officer at Business Objects. "While other vendors are visibly struggling to maintain a patchwork of incompatible tools, our single integrated platform just became stronger by adding a new set of capabilities for improving operational performance. The gap between BusinessObjects XI and competing products has just widened, and our momentum in the marketplace reflects this."

Embedded Analytics Enabled with Web Services and Modern Service Oriented Architecture

The BusinessObjects XI platform is built on a modern, service oriented architecture (SOA), and is the only BI platform that is Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter certified for reliability. This enables organizations to embed intelligence within operational applications and process workflows to bring BI closer to where decisions are made. A focus on supporting industry standards, including business process standards, and comprehensive web services make it easy and inexpensive to seamlessly integrate BI with other applications.

Performance Management Tied to Business Operations

BusinessObjects Process Analysis monitors and analyzes operational processes in real-time. It enables organizations to identify inefficient processes and provide alerts when a process is trending in the wrong direction. Organizations can optimize performance by using BusinessObjects Process Analysis to quickly quantify the cost of inefficiencies and make changes necessary to improve efficiency.

Guided Decision-Making for Every User

BusinessObjects Process Tracker brings structure, repeatability, and accountability to the decision-making process. It allows users to define a series of decision steps, identify owners for each milestone, and guides users through the process. Part of the BusinessObjects XI platform, BusinessObjects Process Tracker provides reports and analytics for each decision point, allows users to collaborate with each other, and delivers an interface for tracking and monitoring processes as milestones are completed.

With more than 30,000 customers worldwide, Business Objects products are already used operationally to improve organizational performance more than any other BI vendor on the market:

--Business Objects software is used today in over 850 packaged applications through OEM partnerships

--Business Objects software is shipped with all leading J2EE and .NET commercial development environments, including BEA, Borland, IBM, and Microsoft

--Business Objects partners announcing widespread support for BusinessObjects XI Built for Operational BI include: CommerceQuest, Lombardi Software, NSite, Savvion, Singularity, and Ultimus

"These new features of BusinessObjects XI allow us to operate our business in an ever more intelligent and profitable manner," said Steve Johansen, CIO at Port of Napier. "Operational dashboards allow us to monitor port operations and BusinessObjects XI also acts as an internal audit system, tracking progress and providing alerts when guidelines are not adhered to. The new functionality of BusinessObjects XI allows all stakeholders simple access to the information they require, in real-time. We actually combine our data with that of our customers to give them a more accurate view of their own business. Business intelligence is the navigation aide and engine room on our voyage into the future, and BusinessObjects XI ensures that it is all smooth sailing."