NEW YORK, NY, March 7, 2005 -- Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today announced the general availability of WebFOCUS 7, an offering that takes business intelligence to the operational level, harnessing the open architecture of the Internet to bring the power of BI to a much larger, more distributed scale of users. WebFOCUS 7 drastically reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with enterprise BI, while addressing the full range of data access and latency needs and embracing operational systems. Unlike other vendors' piecemeal offerings, which have resulted from hasty mergers and acquisitions, WebFOCUS 7 is the result of 30 years of internal research and development of both business intelligence and integration technologies, and it delivers truly seamless architecture integration to users.

There is an industry shift happening -- business intelligence applications are moving into the hands of frontline workers with new and more immediate requirements. Businesses are demanding a solution that puts the data that is needed to make better business decisions in the hands of more users throughout the enterprise. WebFOCUS 7 has been developed to address this demand and help organizations extend business intelligence to encompass operational data and engage users from across and outside of the enterprise. WebFOCUS is already in production at some of the largest companies in the world, such as Ford, Hertz, Invesco and Allianz, with numerous deployments in the hundreds of thousands of users. To address the increasing demand for large-scale user deployments, WebFOCUS 7 has been architected to support literally millions of users and enterprise requirements, unlike other business intelligence tools that focus on supporting individual desktops.

WebFOCUS 7 provides enterprise customers with solutions for the three most common roadblocks to enterprise BI deployments: data integration, hardware and its administration costs, and BI development and support costs. This version includes comprehensive, native access to more than 210 data sources and formats -- including relational and legacy data, data in enterprise applications and staged in data warehouses or marts, and real-time data from operational systems -- on any platform from mainframe, IBM, UNIX, NT or Linux. WebFOCUS 7 also introduces enhanced capabilities for data reconciliation, preparation, cleansing, and transport through technologies like Web services. WebFOCUS 7 can read data as a Web service and allow reports and data to be usable in BI applications, giving it the ability to be an integral part of a service-oriented architecture.

"This version of WebFOCUS brings simplicity to a BI and integration architecture that has not been available to customers until now," said Gerald Cohen, founder and CEO of Information Builders. "The business intelligence and integration capabilities in this product come from years of organic development and in-house expertise. The innovation in WebFOCUS 7 continues to demonstrate the leadership that Information Builders has had in the business intelligence industry for 30 years. Our tenure and history in the market translates into the development of the best BI solutions available to customers."

Scale Matters

Scalability will continue to be a critical theme in business intelligence as organizations look for solutions that will require less hardware, but run more efficiently. WebFOCUS 7 was developed to meet a substantial increase in scalability and enterprise management that supports multiple processors and minimizes customers TCO to improve BI platform architecture. WebFOCUS 7 will have the intelligence to determine where applications will run most efficiently in a user environment, taking the pressure off IT departments to make decisions about which servers can support which applications.

Beta Customers Support WebFOCUS 7 Hands-Down

More than 10,000 satisfied customers around the globe have helped drive the innovation found in WebFOCUS 7. Information Builders conducted beta programs for the product with leading enterprises. Organizations seeking a consistent view of their complex business environments use the Information Builders data integration framework to make that view available to their extended enterprise, which often includes partners, suppliers, customers, and other constituencies. The framework overcomes the gaps in data availability and accessibility, enabling uniform and cost-effective information production, elevating reporting from a collection of functions used by each operational system in the company to an integrated business intelligence platform.

"We have been using WebFOCUS as our enterprise reporting standard for years," said Perry Lipe, CIO of ArvinMeritor, an $8 billion global supplier of integrated systems, modules, and components for the motor vehicle industry. "This new platform from Information Builders will facilitate reliable, informed decision-making while simplifying the user experience and meeting varying levels of information latency within our organization."

"We reviewed every BI product on the market before finally selecting WebFOCUS," said Goran Francke, CIO of Vin & Spirits, the makers of Absolut Vodka. "Integration capabilities were an important requirement in the reporting tool we chose and we felt strongly that only Information Builders offered customers its own complete integration solution, which seamlessly integrated with the WebFOCUS product."

Additional Enhancements

Rapidly evolving business environments are forcing organizations to become much more agile. They must be able to respond to change more quickly, be it regulatory, competitive, or driven by market or customer attitudes. Today, it's increasingly more important for companies to standardize on a single reporting environment so they can optimize business processes, reduce response times, and reduce the costs of moving data across multiple systems and maintaining numerous specialized BI products.

WebFOCUS 7 provides enterprise BI customers with a new generation of technologies, including:

* Architecture - A new end-to-end integrated and service-oriented architecture with full support for Web services; a self-maintaining, self-optimizing autonomic server; and a leapfrog increase in scalability and enterprise management that supports multiple platforms and minimizes customers' TCO.

* Integration - A new unifying integration infrastructure that makes all data -- from structured databases to documents, messages, transactions, and real-time production systems -- available, accessible, and meaningful at all levels of an organization. It also makes that data available regardless of its location, storage medium or format, or the latency involved in its access. The infrastructure accesses, reconciles, cleanses, and prepares the data for business intelligence manipulation, analysis, and delivery.

* Simplicity - The ability to train large numbers of users at little cost, easily delivering a large payload of information. The innovative structured ad hoc mode can deliver that payload with no need to train. Additionally, electronic publishing facilities will deliver via e-mail pixel-perfect live PDF documents - with drill-downs to other parts of the document and to content located anywhere.

* Developer Simplicity - This new version caters more to the needs of developers so they can quickly and easily design, build, test and deploy information systems that can respond to the diverse needs of user communities ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands, making those systems productive enablers of business intelligence.

* User Simplicity - New, significant enhancements to Information Builders' information delivery to users of Microsoft Office products. This provides advances both in analytical visualization and in the BI development community's user experience.

Availability

WebFOCUS 7 Professional Server starts at $35,000 on a single processor NT box. It is available on April 25, 2005.

About Information Builders

Information Builders, a $300 million company, is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and operational Web reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product -- the industry's most secure and flexible -- is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS' empowerment of organizations seeking to leverage all their data by accessing it all -- from legacy to data warehouse -- is unmatched.

Information Builders' award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services for 30 years to more than 7,000 customers and 10,000 sites, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,750 people, and has over 350 business partners.

Web Site: http://www.informationbuilders.com