Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional offers the benefits of highly developed data integration functionalities as well as intelligent reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, and dashboards capabilities. The data integration feature provides the ability to extract data from different database types that include Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Oracle, Ingres, and many others, and integrate that data into a single target source. This is especially critical for small and mid-sized companies that need to integrate their business intelligence functionality across multiple data sources. Companies new to Business Objects Crystal Decisions will also find Professional provides the flexibility to deploy and use business intelligence to complement existing business applications, data sources, and platforms, and delivers insight in a single, affordable package to help solve their business problems.

“Our customers look to us to provide innovative solutions that are easy to deploy, easy to use, and can deliver immediate value,” said Todd Rowe, vice president of worldwide mid-market business at Business Objects. “We continue to be the industry’s leading BI vendor delivering just that – powerful business intelligence solutions at an affordable price point, customized for mid-market users. With the release of Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional, we have added a new set of data integration capabilities to an already market-leading reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, and dashboard solution all of which is designed to fit within the price and deployment constraints of any growing company.”

“We have found that business intelligence is one of the top IT priorities this year for mid-market CIOs,” said Robert Anderson, research vice president for small and mid-sized businesses at Gartner. “With that urgency in mind, it is increasingly important for vendors to address this market with BI solutions that are specifically tailored to the needs of this growing segment.”

The launch of Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional comes on a wave of strong momentum over the last three months following the entry of the Standard edition to the market in February. The Professional edition takes the capabilities of Crystal Decisions to the next level for the rapidly growing customer segment of small and mid-sized companies.

Crystal Decisions Delivers Real-Time Data and Critical Insights for Mid-Sized Customers

Columbia Valley Community Healthcare, a clinic in central Washington that provides medical, dental and behavioral health services to underserved communities, needed a solution to streamline patient case management by aggregating patient data in real-time, ultimately improving patient outcomes and even saving lives.

“Our number one goal is to deliver the best care possible, and Crystal Decisions will enable us to deliver critical patient information to every person involved in a case, from the physician and case managers, to the pharmacists and dieticians,” said Mike Hodgson, chief information officer, Columbia Value Community Healthcare. “Coming from a Fortune 500 company and understanding the value business intelligence can provide, I have never been so excited about a product with this level of sophistication.”

The Bethany Group LLC, based in Irvine, California, is one of the fastest growing top 50 national multi-family property management firms in the U.S. The company recently selected BOCD to provide their executive team with an accurate and consolidated view of their business.

“We felt as if we were traveling the country at top speed, without a roadmap,” said Rob Eitzen, director of programming and analysis at The Bethany Group. “Our executives need an accurate view of our business that is simple, clear, and will quickly give them the business information they are looking for. With the price point and ease-of-use of Business Objects Crystal Decisions, it is hard to see why any growing company would not take advantage of it.”

Another Business Objects customer, Central Maine Medical Family (CMMF), which operates three acute medical facilities in Maine, needed to consolidate financial information and roll out reporting capabilities across its three care facilities in Lewiston, Bridgton and Rumford. Business Objects Crystal Decisions provides greater insights allowing CMMF to easily track revenue against targets and better match staffing to patient requirements, resulting in greater overall efficiency and reduced costs.

“We needed to create a central source of accurate information that was available to all of our hospital division managers, said Wayne Bennett, vice president of finance at Central Maine Medical Family in Lewiston. “After deploying Business Objects Crystal Decisions, we have consolidated all our performance reporting and created cascading dashboards. Business Objects has put greater insight and key actionable information at our fingertips.”

Availability and Pricing

Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional is generally available from Business Objects and its channel partners in twelve languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. To protect customers’ initial investment, Standard edition customers who upgrade to the Professional edition are required to pay only the difference between their initial purchase and the Professional edition list price.

“The addition of Inxight to the Business Objects portfolio will give our customers unsurpassed capabilities in the BI industry and once again raises the bar for true business intelligence,” said John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects. “Our customers want to use the full spectrum of available data to make the best decisions possible and drive optimized organizational performance. Federated search, text analytics, and unstructured data access are a natural and inherent part of business intelligence, and represent an untapped source of knowledge which most organizations have yet to harvest. Whether it’s looking at fraud detection, regulatory compliance, the voice of the customer, or intelligence and counter-terrorism, text analytics can help predict important events before they happen and find opportunities before the competition.”

Inxight Software is a privately-held company, with more than 120 employees and 2006 revenues in excess of $25 million. Born out of Xerox PARC, Inxight is a recognized leader in providing innovative solutions for unstructured information discovery across 32 languages. Inxight customers include Air Products, AOL, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Novartis, and Thomson, as well as multiple U.S. and foreign government agencies such as the Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and Commonwealth Secretariat. The company has more than 300 software OEM agreements with companies including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and SAS. Inxight is already a member of the Business Objects Technology Partner Program.

“We’re excited to join the Business Objects team, and already see incredible opportunities for synergies and applications of our technology,” said Ian Bonner, president and CEO of Inxight. “BusinessObjects XI will provide cleansing, auditing, and data processing capabilities that no other text analytics solutions currently possess, while the Business Objects reporting, analysis and dashboards will allow text analysis to be delivered in a familiar way to a very large audience. We will be able to quickly and easily incorporate text analytics and unstructured data into the decision-making workflows of millions of information workers and start to bring these technologies into the mainstream.”

Delivering Full Spectrum Business Intelligence

Traditional business intelligence offerings focus on accessing, analyzing, and sharing information almost exclusively from structured sources such as operational systems and data warehouses. While this information is very useful in helping companies improve performance, it represents only a small fraction of the available data within an organization. Such structured data doesn’t provide a view into the human side of information – the unstructured thoughts, feelings, and emotions of customers, partners, and employees that are typically captured in unstructured formats.

Business Objects is aiming to break down the barriers to full spectrum BI, and deliver the first solution that natively combines both structured and unstructured data across all areas of business intelligence – from enterprise information management to information discovery and delivery to performance management. This will help customers combine both quantitative and qualitative information to gain a more complete and accurate view of their business.

Inxight’s suite of products includes powerful search federation; summarization, categorization, and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation; and visualization. These products support the analysis and understanding of relationships, trends, timelines, and patterns in data that would otherwise go unnoticed.

For example, Inxight technology is being used in the analysis of customer interactions in call centers and online customer chat sessions, which are typically inaccessible by traditional BI systems. This analysis can uncover customer dissatisfaction and product and pricing issues earlier, resulting in faster, proactive product changes and customer communications. Inxight’s text analytics software is also being used to uncover risk areas in email, such as private or sensitive data leaving an organization in violation of internal or externally mandated policy.

With this acquisition, Business Objects expands its leadership in extending BI to embrace enterprise search. Going beyond basic keyword searches and solutions that simply provide a ranked listing of searched items, Inxight’s web services-based federated search and extraction capabilities extend the value of enterprise search engines by instantly clustering and filtering results from multiple search engines, including Google Search Appliance and Oracle Secure Enterprise Search. By providing a BI platform that leverages these capabilities, Business Objects will become the first vendor to bridge the gap between search and intelligence – delivering a broader view of data and dramatically accelerating the ability to locate hidden information in search results that might otherwise be overlooked.

Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ) announced its 2007 Americas Partner Excellence Award winners. The Business Objects Partner Excellence Awards recognize Business Objects partners for their tremendous contributions to deploying solutions based on Business Objects technology, as well as for their leadership, innovation, and commitment to helping companies reap the business-transforming benefits of business intelligence. The awards were formally presented at the annual Business Objects Americas Partner Summit, held last week in Charleston, South Carolina.

“Business Objects has an unmatched organization of global partners, which we rely on to bring specific industry expertise, deployment experience, and a rich history of developing innovative solutions for customers looking to leverage the power of intelligent information,” said Janet Wood, senior vice president of global partnerships and sales enablement at Business Objects. “Each year, we recognize a select group of these companies with our Partner Excellence Awards, which are presented to those organizations that stand out among their peers for drive, dedication, and thought-leadership in the business intelligence industry.”

At the Partner Summit awards ceremony, Business Objects honored top partner performers from the Americas in a variety of categories, including:

Most Innovative Use of Technology: Distinguishes the partner that leveraged or integrated Business Objects technology with other applications in the most innovative way to solve challenging customer requirements. This year’s award went to APOS Systems for their outstanding efforts in creating an Integration Kit that unites BusinessObjects XI Release 2 with ESRI, the #1 GIS mapping software.

Solution Provider Partner of the Year: Honors the Solution Provider Partner that delivered the most incremental license revenue while also significantly expanding their customer portfolio, attaining high marks in teamwork and executing successful, integrated marketing programs. The Solution Provide Partner of the year is Decision First Technologies, which was recognized for the third year in a row after achieving the top revenue results of any North America Solution Provider Partner.

Reseller Partner of the Year: Distinguishes the Business Objects Reseller who achieved top revenue contribution and most significantly extended Business Objects’ customer reach. The winner this year was Softmart, which was recognized for achieving record growth and increasing year-over-year revenues an impressive 45 percent by offering broader and deeper solutions to their customers.

OEM Partner of the Year: Honors the Business Objects partner who delivers the most compelling application leveraging Business Objects technology. Realm Business Solutions, Inc. was the winner for achieving an impressive 78 percent growth in OEM revenues year over year with Realm INSIGHT XI. Realm achieved this growth by helping its customers improve business performance by enabling them to track, understand, and manage business goals and strategy all the while lowering TCO through a standardized BI infrastructure. Realm was a leader in adopting BusinessObjects XI Premium and extending Business Objects Performance Management capabilities for new customers and, soon after, migrating to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 Premium to help customers transition from older versions.

Technology Partner of the Year: Honors the Business Objects partner who delivers the most compelling stand-alone application leveraging Business Objects technology. The Business Objects Technology Partner of the Year is Netezza Corporation. Netezza provides a formally supported data warehouse platform by Business Objects, and has highly optimized data connections with BusinessObjects XI Release 2, including the popular BusinessObjects Data Integrator ETL solution.

Global Alliance Partner of the Year: Honors the partner that provided outstanding expertise in strategy, design, implementation, and customization services for Business Objects business intelligence solutions with key customers. The Business Objects Global Alliance Partner of the Year is Accenture. Accenture is being recognized for its notable customer successes, solution innovation, and partner support. As information pioneers, Accenture’s world class consulting organization has worked with Business Objects to build successful new joint assets and solutions for specific industries including: Federal Financials, Data Quality Assessment, Metrics Management System, and Performance Business Intelligence for Accenture Communication Solutions.

Latin America Partner of the Year: Recognizes the Business Objects partner that worked collaboratively with Business Objects to drive the most significant market penetration and customer satisfaction in Latin America. The winner is Info Providers, Inc., which has experienced significant successes by leveraging extensive knowledge of the Consumer Packaged Goods industry.

Education Services Partner of the Year: Recognizes the Business Objects partner that delivered the most onsite and public education services revenue, executed excellent class participation rates, and consistently achieved top customer satisfaction ratings. The winner of this year’s award is The Woodburn Group. The Woodburn Group was recognized for the second year in a row for exemplifying what it means to be an outstanding Authorized Education Partner through their commitment to achieving, and over-achieving, both their Public Training and Onsite Training targets while also making customer service a key priority.

Best Enterprise Implementation: Recognizes the partner that delivered the year’s most outstanding implementation at an enterprise customer, as measured by the impact of the solution in solving the customer’s business requirements, providing overall customer satisfaction, and delivering rapid time to value. IBM won the Best Enterprise Implementation award for their implementation with a leading energy provider. By collaborating services expertise in utilities, enterprise process, analytics, and business intelligence, IBM and Business Objects delivered a solution that tracks power outages and the frequency of the occurrences of such outages. This insight enables this utility company to avoid fines imposed by local and state government agencies. This innovative use of information on demand will have a significant impact on their bottom line.

Best Mid-Market Implementation: Recognizes the partner that delivered the year’s most outstanding implementation at a mid-market customer, as measured by the impact of the solution in solving the customer’s business requirements, overall customer satisfaction, and rapid time to value. This year’s winner is Andrews Consulting Group, which was recognized for its implementation at a leading premium winemaker. Using its product RapidDecision®, a pre-built data warehouse and data mart solution for JD Edwards, Andrews Consulting sped the integration of Business Objects ultimately delivering the customer greater access to critical business information and faster time to value.

QuickStart Packs are integrated solutions that essentially package the extensive experience Business Objects partners have in key vertical industries, including Retail Banking, Insurance, Healthcare and Manufacturing; or with specific line-of-business applications such as JD Edwards. Each QuickStart Pack will include report and dashboard templates, as well as pre-built data connectors to help speed and simplify the deployment of relevant and results-driven business intelligence. With QuickStart Packs, mid-size organizations can quickly get up and running with a business intelligence solution that is already tailored to their specific business needs.

“Business Objects’ mid-market value proposition continues to strengthen with each new product release,” said James Kobielus, principal analyst at Current Analysis. “Crystal Decisions provides Business Objects channel partners with a robust, extensible, SOA-enabled platform for developing mid-market QuickStart Packs that are tailored to the BI needs of various horizontal, vertical, compliance, and regional customer segments. The new product line and associated QuickStart Pack partner program will provide mid-size companies with tailored BI solutions that bring together key business metrics, data connectors, and reports with off-the-shelf convenience.”

Initial QuickStart Packs Launched by Partners Today

Three initial QuickStart Packs were launched today by INSolve, Preferred Strategies, and RapidDecision. Business Objects is also currently working with a number of other partners on QuickStart Pack development and certification. These rapid deployment solutions are expected to be launched throughout 2007 and beyond.

The first set of QuickStart solutions launched in separate announcements today by INSolve, Preferred Strategies, and RapidDecision include:

• INSolve Functional Intelligence QuickStart Pack – an insurance-based fast track to business intelligence, this solution provides the initial framework for consolidated and customizable views of enterprise and departmental data, structured to optimize analysis, reporting, and decision-making capabilities. Full details available are at www.insolve.com.
• Preferred Strategies BI Quick Launch for JDE QuickStart Pack – a cost-effective jumpstart for integrating JD Edwards with Business Objects (against live data or data warehouse) that empowers management with instant visibility into financial and operational performance with reports fully customized to your data in one day. The solution, which is based on Preferred Strategies report templates, samples, queries, and universes, significantly accelerates additional report customization, development, deployment, and processing. Full details are available at http://www.preferredstrategies.com.
• RapidDecision QuickStart Pack – an out-of-the-box JD Edwards data warehouse solution that allows organizations to perfect the connection between JDE and their Business Objects software. The solution delivers real-time information allowing companies to immediately perform simple queries, generate ad hoc reports, or develop robust dashboards and analytics, while also simplifying the process of getting information out of JDE application and into the hands of key decision-makers. Full details are available at www.rapiddecision.com.

These three solutions are available directly from each partner. In addition, partners also have the option to enable Business Objects to resell their certified QuickStart Packs.

“We realize that our extensive partner network has considerable industry and application-specific knowledge that brings significant value to our joint customers,” said Todd Rowe, vice president and general manager of worldwide mid-market business at Business Objects. “By working with our partner community to create add-on solutions that are deeply integrated with the Business Objects Crystal Decisions platform, Business Objects and our partners make it even easier for our customers to gain access to tailored business intelligence. The new QuickStart Packs will shorten deployment processes and deliver even faster time to value.”

Today’s announcement aligns with a recent commitment from Business Objects to drive mid-market professional services primarily through the company’s network of proven partners. By offering the Crystal Decisions portfolio, certified QuickStart Packs, and optional consulting services, Business Objects partners can offer mid-size companies a complete, cost-effective solution for relevant BI.

About Business Objects Crystal Decisions

Business Objects Crystal Decisions offers a flexible and affordable way for mid-size companies to gain the benefits of business intelligence. The portfolio includes all the functionality of the enterprise-class BusinessObjectsâ„¢ XI platform, but at a lower price and with streamlined deployment options designed for small to mid-sized companies. The solution provides the flexibility to deploy and use BI to complement existing business applications, data sources, and platforms, and delivers insight in a single, affordable package. For more information, visit www.businessobjects.com/grow.

“Business intelligence solutions have become mission-critical for companies looking to improve operations and make more strategic business decisions,” said David Stodder, editor-in-chief of Intelligent Enterprise. “The imperative to deploy solutions that are robust and feature-rich, yet easy to use and cost-effective is not lost on our readers, who have again recognized Business Objects as the go-to company for the best BI suite. Being a winner of a Readers’ Choice Award for six straight years is a testament to the ongoing innovation and leadership of Business Objects.”

“BusinessObjects XI Release 2 is the result of years of experience developing mission critical business intelligence solutions for customers in every sector of the market around the world, and is the foundation upon which our customers transform the way they work through intelligent information,” said John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects. “We’re thrilled that the readers at Intelligent Enterprise recognized Business Objects as providing the best BI suite, and for honoring our contribution to data quality and profiling solutions.”

BusinessObjects XI Release 2 is the latest version of the industry’s most advanced and complete business intelligence platform. The release brings unprecedented simplicity to end users, delivers trusted information, and makes it easier for customers to standardize on a single BI platform. For additional information on BusinessObjects XI Release 2, please visit http://www.businessobjects.com/businessobjectsxi.

The full list of Intelligent Enterprise 2006 Reader’s Choice Award winners can be seen in the January 1, 2007, issue of the magazine or viewed online at http://www.intelligententerprise.com/print_article.jhtml?articleID =196603898. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser’s address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

It has signed a 14,000-seat software licence with Business Objects.

The three-year installation and support deal is the largest local win for Business Objects, which originated in France and is now listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

“Australia Post is embarking on a performance management initiative, and will use our software to help it do all reporting and analysis,” Business Objects Asia-Pacific general manager Keith Budge said.

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