Business Objects Provides Retail Customers Flexibility for Data Warehouse Connectivity; Partnerships With Leading Enterprise Data Warehouse Solution Providers Help; Joint Customers Quickly Access and Analyze Large Volumes of Disparate Data

Business Wire, Jan 16, 2006

NEW YORK -- The retail industry is among the most data intensive industries today. Functional roles with retail organizations are increasingly looking to deploy business intelligence (BI) solutions on top of specialized enterprise data warehouses to enable them more easily make sense of all this data. To help ensure the success of these BI deployments, Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ)(Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 -- BOB), the world's leading provider of BI solutions, has partnered with the top enterprise data warehouse solution providers. These partnerships provide the flexibility to enable Business Objects customers to choose the data warehouse solution that best suits their needs, while ensuring that Business Objects will support the connectivity between the two solutions.

Enterprise data warehouses are designed to handle complex analyses of terabytes of data, and combined with a business intelligence solution deliver an easier way for companies to conduct in-depth analyses of their data to leverage important trends. BusinessObjects(TM) XI, the industry's leading business intelligence platform, offers connectivity to a variety of data warehouse solutions to help ensure world-class BI deployments. This data warehouse connectivity enables retailers to address specific business issues, including store assortment optimization, customer profiling and campaign management, and loss prevention. The BusinessObjects XI performance management applications provide retailers with the BI capabilities to address these specific issues and drive performance and profitability within their organizations.

"In today's hectic business environment, organizations need to be more agile, and the combination of an enterprise data warehouse and world-class business intelligence solution can help companies achieve this," said Rene Bonvanie, chief marketing officer of Business Objects. "Business Objects leads the BI industry in providing customers with a wide array of data warehouse connectivity options to enable them to deploy a high-performance and scalable data analysis solution."

Business Objects has formed strong partnerships with leading data warehousing vendors, including IBM, Teradata, Netezza, and DATAllegro:

IBM

Business Objects has partnered with IBM for more than 10 years and the two companies share more than 3000 joint customers. Business Objects has worked closely with IBM Information Management to develop industry specific data warehouse solutions. IBM Information Management provides the data warehouse infrastructure for decision making and Business Objects provides the visualization with roles-based dashboards to make that information actionable.

Business Objects and IBM are premier partners in retail, with hundreds of joint customers worldwide including Auchan, Mark's Works Warehouse, and Kohl's Department Store. Joint customers benefit from a deep level of integration, with solutions optimized all the way down to the data model level. The IBM Retail Business Intelligence Solution combines IBM's Retail Data Warehouse with key reports and analytics from Business Objects that enable enterprise reporting and performance management in virtually every aspect of a retail business. The integrated solution leverages the IBM Retail Data Warehouse Model, which is compliant with the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) Data Model and delivers industry best practices.

Similarly, IBM and Business Objects have developed integrated solutions for Banking and Insurance enabling Financial Services organizations to unlock information stored in legacy systems. The tight integration of these solutions simplifies deployment, speeds time to value, enabling companies to focus on critical business issues, gain greater visibility across the enterprise, and make more informed decisions when driving the business.

Teradata

Business Objects and Teradata enjoy a solid partnership and have more than 300 joint customers. Business Objects has worked closely with Teradata to optimize its BI platform for use with Teradata solutions, and also achieved a benchmark certification to run as a part of the Retail Decisions solutions from Teradata. The combination of Business Objects BI tools and Teradata's database delivers a safe and proven choice for organizations looking for enterprise BI deployments.

"As Rene Bonvanie mentioned, being agile is critical in meeting the challenges of the competition and the ever-changing business environment which our customers face today," said Randy S. Lea, vice president of product and services marketing for Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation. "The BI solution must not only be powerful and make it easy and flexible to view the enterprise data, but it also must be easy to implement the underlying data warehouse platform. The agility, ease of use, and sophistication provided by Business Objects combined with the agility to grow and enhance the warehouse, ease of use, and price/performance of Teradata has been a key driver for Teradata's leadership position in enterprise data warehousing."