SAN JOSE, Calif. - April 23, 2003 - A dramatic shift in the business intelligence industry is taking place, one company at a time, around the world. Top performing companies are turning to business intelligence (BI) from Business Objects (Nasdaq: BOBJ) to enable their employees, partners, and customers to track, understand, and manage data that is vital to their enterprise performance. These businesses are placing high demands on business intelligence - they require powerful web query, reporting, and analysis; an advanced and complete suite of analytic applications; seamless connectivity to packaged applications, and an integrated, end-to-end BI suite.
With today's announcement of BusinessObjects™ Enterprise 6, Business Objects has set a new standard in the BI market by delivering an integrated BI suite that enables companies to push the envelope of their deployments even further. Customer feedback on Enterprise 6 has been very positive, and provides an early glimpse into the truly powerful and groundbreaking business intelligence deployments of tomorrow.
Customers Embrace BusinessObjects Enterprise 6
BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 has been tested and evaluated by over 100 customers worldwide, on many different platforms and applications. This diverse set of customers includes Hewlett Packard, Hitachi Systems & Services Ltd., Ingram Micro, NEC Soft. Ltd., Owens & Minor, Rhodia, Simon & Schuster, STMicroelectronics, Unisys, and WCIRB of California. Following are some of the comments on Enterprise 6 from these customers.
Hewlett Packard
"WebIntelligence® 6.0 delivers the ultimate combination: powerful technology in a thin client," said Antoine Larmanjat, Business Reporting Manager, HP Division PRM IT EMEA. "Until now, our users spent 70 percent of their time searching for information while only 30 percent analyzing it. The rich functionality found in this new version will allow us to reverse this ratio. With Enterprise 6, we will be able to quickly roll-out WebIntelligence at HP for 15,000 users worldwide, including 5,000 in Europe. Employees will be trained quickly while optimizing costs; in addition to our virtual classrooms, we have developed personalized Computer-Based Training tools in conjunction with Business Objects for our specific environment. "
Hitachi Systems and Services, Ltd.
"The market has longed for a sophisticated web solution, and BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 delivers enhanced web-based query, reporting, and analysis that lives up to expectations. Enterprise 6 is sure to continue to lead the market in terms of accelerating BI deployments throughout the enterprise."
IT Manager, Hitachi Systems and Services, Ltd.
Ingram Micro
The largest global wholesale provider of technology products and services, Ingram Micro (NYSE: IM) has developed an advanced BI deployment with Business Objects. The company uses Business Objects to leverage the huge amount of data that flows in from several sources every day, including clickstream, sales, customer feedback, and infrastructure performance data. By providing Ingram Micro executives and department managers with information served up by Business Objects, managers can take action that results in more profitable customer relationships, more efficient supply chains, and improved website performance.
Because Ingram Micro supports a large Business Objects user base, they were very focused on testing the web-based BI capabilities of Enterprise 6. "Business Objects has taken an integrated, end-to-end approach with the Enterprise 6 suite that provides for full web deployment of user services," said David Muller, senior director, information strategy, Ingram Micro. "WebIntelligence 6.0 includes many features that we were looking for, including user-defined calculations, multi-block reports, and the ability to organize and retrieve key reports much faster than before."
NEC Soft. Ltd.
"The sophisticated user interface provides an even easier-to-use product. New capabilities, such as saving documents to Excel, will be of great use to companies with large BI deployments who wish to further extend their use of Business Objects."
Director, CRM Group, Business Solution Division, NEC Soft, Ltd.
Owens & Minor
Owens & Minor, (NYSE: OMI), a $4.0 billion supplier of medical and surgical supplies, has been a marquee Business Objects customer for several years. Using WebIntelligence from Business Objects, the company has deployed a supply chain extranet to over 200 customers and suppliers throughout North America. These customers can access, analyze, and share valuable information on supply chain, purchasing history, and pricing, which allows them to identify opportunities to consolidate supplier contracts and reduce procurement costs. In addition, the hospitals can improve performance on just-in-time inventory, allowing them to lower costs while at the same time improving quality of care.
In testing Enterprise 6, Owens & Minor was looking for a solution that would support their continued expansion of this extranet. "We pioneered the BI extranet market with Business Objects four years ago, and Enterprise 6 will allow us to provide more value and power to our customers, partners, and suppliers who use the extranet," said Don Stoller, director, information management, Owens & Minor. "WebIntelligence 6.0 delivers more functionality, especially in the area of ad-hoc analysis and the ability to store and retrieve data in an improved fashion. It is clear that Business Objects has put a lot of emphasis on delivering a truly "extranet ready" product, which will allow us to continue expansion of our WISDOM (WebIntelligence Supporting Decisions from Owens & Minor) extranet going forward."
Rhodia
"With Enterprise 6, Business Objects clearly shows its resolve to converge WebIntelligence with the client server version," said Christian Tiberghien, project leader, Rhodia. "It's a considerable strength that will likely move us to create an extranet to make our information available to our clients. We have closely watched developments in terms of stability and have successfully completed two series of capacity tests. We are completely confident with this new version."
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, one of the world's largest publishing companies, has deployed Business Objects as its enterprise BI standard to over 300 users in the sales, marketing, publishing, and supply chain departments. In addition, Simon & Schuster uses Business Objects to provide a supply chain extranet to partners in its distribution network.
Paul Zanis, director, business information systems, Simon & Schuster, has tested Enterprise 6 with several of their key Business Objects users, and gives it a strong review. "Our end-users really like the new front-end of Enterprise 6," said Zanis. "It is more intuitive, easier to use and easier to navigate when looking for information. In addition, by delivering a Java compliant BI product with WebIntelligence 6.0, Business Objects is creating a completely web-based BI tool. This gives us and our distribution partners more flexibility in how they use the product, and will allow us to expand our extranet to more end users."
STMicroelectronics
STMicroelectronics is a global independent semiconductor company and a leader in developing and delivering semiconductor solutions across the spectrum of microelectronics applications. The company uses Business Objects as its BI standard, and has tested Enterprise 6 with positive results.
"Business Objects is delivering just what we are looking for in Enterprise 6," said Alessandro Cunico, Enterprise Data Warehouse Group, STMicroelectronics. "We are pleased with the native support for Unix, the product quality and stability, and the ability to customize the portal interface in Business Objects."
Unisys
Unisys is a worldwide information technology services and solutions company www.unisys.com. Business Objects is the global BI standard at Unisys, with over 8,000 users in 51 different countries. Employees use Business Objects in several departments, including finance, human resources, marketing, sales, and supply chain.
With such a large deployment, Unisys made sure to test BusinessObjects Enterprise 6 rigorously. IT staff and end users tested the product extensively, with positive results. "Enterprise 6 is clearly what we were looking for," said Thierry Leleu, business intelligence program manager. "The product is easier to use and provides more flexibility to our end users. We especially like the multi-tab reporting capabilities and more seamless approach for downloading into Excel. Enterprise 6 will allow us to continue expanding our deployment of Business Objects to more users throughout our company."
Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California (WCIRB of California)
WCIRB of California is an unincorporated, nonprofit association comprised of all companies licensed to transact workers' compensation insurance in California and has over 400 member companies. For over 85 years, the insurance commissioner, legislature, insurers, and others have relied upon the WCIRB as the premier source of reliable workers' compensation information and statistics. Today, Business Objects plays a strategic role in this mission, as WCIRB uses a Business Objects-powered extranet to provide detailed and timely insurance information over the web to member insurance companies, as well as a data-rich research warehouse for the Bureau's actuaries. Business Objects teamed with BASE Consulting Group and Bureau IT staff to provide technology and consulting to deploy this extranet.
"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, WCIRB of California. "With Enterprise 6, Business Objects is building on their strength in web-based business intelligence, and Enterprise 6 offers many new features we expect to use in the future. This will allow our constituents to do more with the information we give them, and strengthen our relationships with our key partners and clients."
