Business Objects Germany Business Intelligence Products

Presseinformation 6-03
23. April 2003

BUSINESS OBJECTS ANNOUNCES
BUSINESSOBJECTS ENTERPRISE 6

Industry's Leading Suite of Integrated Business Intelligence Products Establishes New Standards in Functionality and Integration

SAN JOSE, Calif. - April 23, 2003 - Business Objects, (Nasdaq: BOBJ), the leading provider of business intelligence solutions, today announced BusinessObjects™ Enterprise 6, the new version of its industry-leading BI suite that enables organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise performance. Enterprise 6 offers four key advantages over all other business intelligence suites on the market today: it provides the industry's best web query, reporting, and analysis; the most advanced and complete suite of analytic applications; the best connectivity to packaged applications; and is the most integrated BI suite.

Enterprise 6 is the company's suite of integrated business intelligence products comprising enterprise analytic applications, a business intelligence platform, and data integration products. Enterprise 6 provides organizations with one integrated, functionally complete BI environment for all users, from the casual report viewer to the report author to the data analyst, and ensures compatibility between all elements of the BI suite.

"Today's announcement marks a very important milestone for the company," said Bernard Liautaud, chairman and chief executive officer of Business Objects. "Enterprise 6 builds on our extraordinary history of innovation and sets the new benchmark for integrated business intelligence suites. I would like to thank our thousands of customers who over the years have deployed our products and have been instrumental in helping us evolve our core solutions to become the standard in business intelligence."

Enterprise 6 boasts new and updated products and a host of improved functionality, specifically: a brand new version of WebIntelligence®, an enhanced BI portal, a new enterprise data warehouse, end-to-end metadata integration, increased scalability and performance, and improved infrastructure and administration.

WebIntelligence 6.0: the most powerful web query, reporting, and analysis product on the market
As BI deployments have evolved, many users have matured beyond simple report viewing and want to create, edit, and analyze reports in detail over the web. In addition, users outside the organization must be able to access information via extranets. With WebIntelligence 6.0, customers benefit from the most sophisticated web-based BI product on the market, combining powerful functionality and easy to use features for all levels of users. In addition, unlike other tools on the market, WebIntelligence 6.0 provides a single web-based product for ad-hoc query, enterprise reporting, and analysis. Notable new features in WebIntelligence 6.0 include:

Multi-block reports,
Sophisticated user-defined calculations,
Synchronized multi-block navigation,
Report component templates,
Zero-footprint hypertext markup language (HTML) report creation, and
An option to save or publish richly formatted reports to Microsoft Excel and Adobe Acrobat.

"We selected Business Objects because they are the leader in business intelligence extranets, and we are constantly looking for ways to use the web to improve our level of service to our constituents," said Randy Mellin, CIO, Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California. "With Enterprise 6, Business Objects is building on their strength in web-based business intelligence. This will allow our constituents to do more with the information we give them, and strengthen our relationships with our key partners and clients."

Enhanced BI portal simplifies organization of critical corporate information
Information technology (IT) managers understand the importance of providing users with an easy and powerful entry point into relevant business information. BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 delivers a significantly enhanced BI portal, making it easier for users of all levels to quickly find the information they need to do their jobs. Enterprise 6 includes new end user analysis functions such as interactive sorting and filtering, easier document navigation, and one click personalization. IT staff will benefit by leveraging customizable active server page (ASP) and java server page (JSP) interfaces and portal skins that enable quicker corporate customization of the BI portal. Furthermore, organizations can continue to rapidly integrate valuable BI content into their enterprise information portals.

Enterprise analytic applications powered by new BusinessObjects Warehouse
Enterprise 6 includes the BusinessObjects Warehouse, a modular enterprise data warehouse that collects data from disparate systems and makes it usable for business intelligence across the enterprise. The warehouse is populated by connectors powered by BusinessObjects Data Integrator and includes embedded best practices and data warehousing experience. This greatly reduces the time needed to build and deploy analytic applications and accelerates time to BI value, while ensuring that all users are working from a consistent view of information and thus have one version of the truth across the enterprise.

Connectivity to packaged applications and end-to-end metadata management
Organizations are moving beyond departmental BI applications to connect all areas of the enterprise, including sales, marketing, finance, products, and supply chain. This requires a common data platform that provides a consistent view of the business from every department. As part of Enterprise 6, BusinessObjects Data Integrator uses native interfaces to extract data from packaged enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) applications such as SAP, Siebel, Oracle, and PeopleSoft, as well as custom applications. Data Integrator then quickly integrates and transforms this data to enable analysis and reporting across the enterprise. In addition, BI users need consistent and timely feeds of data from source operational systems. Enterprise 6 provides easy metadata management including real-time alerts from operational systems out to enterprise management dashboards.

Increased scalability and performance translate to more powerful BI
BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 features a more efficient architecture, specifically a new connection pooling process, a new login server, a faster full client calculation engine, a multi-threaded report engine, and page-by-page report generation. This provides faster report generation, calculations, and other system-intensive activities. As a result, Enterprise 6 provides significant performance and scalability gains over previous product releases.

Improved infrastructure and administration provide easier installation, deployment, and maintenance
BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 streamlines the configuration and installation process providing easier setup, deployment, and maintenance of the BI system. In addition, with a new reporting software developer kit (SDK) and a new security SDK, Enterprise 6 makes it easier for partners and customers to incorporate Business Objects functionality into their own applications and extranets, extending BI deployments to more users. Enterprise 6 also features integration with software management systems, enhanced metadata validation, and an improved administration console.

Customer Response
BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 has been tested and evaluated by more than 100 customers worldwide, including:

Banque de France	MasterCard
BNP Paribas	NEC
British Airways	NCR
Cisco Systems	Owens & Minor
EDS	Rhodia
France Telecom	Simon & Schuster
Hitachi SAS	STMicroelectronics
Infineon	Swiss Re
Ingram Micro	Unisys

Customers wanting to learn more about BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 are invited to join a live web seminar titled First Look: A BI Breakthrough Revealed, to be held Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 10:00am PDT. To register, go to www.businessobjects.com/e6_webinar.

In addition, data sheets and product brochures can be accessed by going to www.businessobjects.com/enterprise6/.

Availability
BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 is in production on Windows. It will be generally available on Windows and HP UX, IBM AIX, and Sun Solaris by May 15, 2003.

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