Business Objects Announces BusinessObjects Data Quality XI; New Solution Builds on Business Objects Enterprise Information Management Strategy to Provide Organizations with Single, Trusted Source of Information

Business Wire, July 31, 2006

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 the launch of BusinessObjects(TM) Data Quality XI, a suite of products that advance the data quality solutions acquired from Firstlogic, Inc. Data Quality XI includes innovative features that help organizations standardize on one data quality platform, scale their data quality deployment to meet growing business needs, and simplify data quality tools so that more users can benefit from trusted data. Data Quality XI is the latest milestone in the Business Objects enterprise information management (EIM) strategy, which provides a foundation of trustworthy data for BI and performance management initiatives.

According to a recent Harris Interactive survey(1), information workers in the U.S. spend an average of 12 hours per week verifying the accuracy of data, translating into a significant productivity loss. Business Objects is the only BI vendor to offer a comprehensive (EIM) strategy designed to ensure that employees have access to accurate, timely data.

"Business Objects stands apart because it is the only BI vendor that provides a complete EIM solution that's fully integrated with their BI solutions," said Ed Todd, data warehouse manager at Nemours. "The company's EIM solution just got one step better with Data Quality XI. Nemours pediatricians provided quality health care to nearly a quarter million children last year alone. Ensuring complete, accurate data is critical for our physicians and researchers to provide leadership and services to restore and improve the health of children. Data quality is of paramount importance to any health care organization -- and Data Quality XI will help us improve the quality of information and overall visibility into our work to provide pediatric health care to our nation's most vulnerable population."

"Business Objects recognizes that successful BI and performance management require a trusted data foundation, and Data Quality XI enhances the EIM offering we provide to customers," said Frank Dravis, vice president of EIM marketing at Business Objects. "We stand alone amongst BI vendors in offering our customers technologies and services to support an EIM strategy, and that's why customers are choosing Business Objects to put trusted data in the hand of every decision maker -- in the most recently reported quarter, our EIM license revenue grew 78 percent year-over-year."

Enhanced Business Rule Management and Web Services Make Standardization Easier

In a recent study by The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), 70 percent of the 750 users surveyed ranked standardization as the most important feature of a data quality solution(2). Business Objects enables companies to define standards that establish consistent data quality practices across the organization.

Data Quality XI makes standardization easier with new features including:

--A centralized business rule repository that lets customers create business rules, which can be consistently applied across the company and results in more reliable data quality. For example, a company can use Data Quality XI to consolidate multiple sales databases and ensure that the same data quality process is applied throughout the company.

--A service oriented architecture, which enables different departments across the organization to access and share the business rules repository. Web services give administrators a flexible way to deploy data quality solutions, which lets them respond quickly to business events.

New Features Helps Enterprises Scale to Meets Growing Business Needs

Data Quality XI provides customers with a scalable data quality platform that can be extended as their business grows. The new solution helps organizations resolve challenges like ensuring data quality within and across multiple enterprise applications, regulatory compliance programs, and international growth.

Data Quality XI helps organizations extend and address changing business challenges by providing:

--Integration with currently available third-party and proprietary applications including SAP, Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and Informatica. These new capabilities can be quickly deployed to ensure data quality within these applications, which adds value to the application and builds user confidence in the data.

--An automated watch list solution that helps companies comply with the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Organizations can automatically match their databases against government watch lists to identify criminal suspects or suspicious financial transactions, including terrorists, money launderers, or drug traffickers. Data Quality XI includes new watch lists to ensure compliance and avoid government imposed penalties.

--Expanded international capabilities for localized data quality projects. Now when companies expand globally, they can maintain the same business rules across the company for data quality process while adhering to local address and naming conventions. Data Quality XI supports offers new locale specific parsing for Arabic, French, Spanish and Portuguese data as well as global matching capabilities for China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and other non-Latin scripts.