NEW YORK, NY, March 19, 2007 -- Information Builders, the leader in production business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that the City of Richmond, Virginia Police Department – a long-standing customer demonstrating innovative use of Information Builders’ WebFOCUS technology – was named the winner of the prestigious Gartner Business Intelligence Excellence Award. The award was presented by Gartner at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit held last week in Chicago.

The Gartner BI Excellence Award was developed to highlight world-class BI initiatives and broadly share business successes, technical challenges, and insights from organizations around the world. The award drew more than 1,000 nominations this year. Judges narrowed the field to three finalists – Cummins Inc., JCPenny, and the Richmond Police Department – who presented their case studies at Gartner’s BI Summit to a judicious audience, comprised of business intelligence and data warehousing specialists, information and systems architects, and business strategists.

“We have always known our customers were developing some of the most innovative applications in the industry,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. “We believe having external recognition in BI excellence from attendees at a Gartner event really reinforces the remarkable results the City of Richmond Police Department has achieved with WebFOCUS.”

Using the integration capabilities of WebFOCUS, predictive analysis from SPSS and dynamic geographic information mapping from ESRI, the system predicts the likelihood of crime in each city sector. The new operational system powered by WebFOCUS allows the city’s crime analysts to look at the interaction between present and past data, such as arrest records, motive, and type of crime at a particular location based on the day, time, weather, and the coincidence of public events. This insight enables the city to knowledgeably optimize police resources to deter crime. As a result, crime was decreased by 49 percent and citizen made fewer 911 calls.

“We are honored to be recognized by Gartner’s attendees, particularly given the number of excellent nominations for BI use,” said Rodney Monroe, chief of the Richmond Police Department. “WebFOCUS has enabled us to capture and analyze data to better guide law enforcement and serve the community. To date, our officers have arrested 16 fugitives and confiscated 18 guns with the new system. In the first week of May 2006, we had no homicides, compared with three in the same week in 2005. We attribute this and many other success rates to the ability to target areas where crimes might occur and deploy officers proactively based on the calculated probability of shooting incidents. BI technology has undoubtedly helped to increase public safety and reduce emergency calls.”

About Information Builders

Information Builders, an innovator for more than 30 years, makes the most widely deployed business (BI) intelligence solution and is the leader in production BI. WebFOCUS, the company's flagship product, is a comprehensive and fully integrated business intelligence platform whose architecture and simplicity permeate every level of the extended enterprise – executive, analytical, and operational. Developed with all users in mind – regardless of technical skills – it is the most secure and flexible solution in the market, helping organizations build applications that have no barriers, and scale from a dozen to hundreds of thousands of users. Information Builders is the only vendor to offer its own integration solution with iWay Software. The seamless integration with WebFOCUS, creates unrivaled access to any information source.

Information Builders' award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,500 people and has more than 350 business partners.

Contacts 
Information Builders
Kathleen Moran, 212-736-4433
kathleen_moran@ibi.com