NEW YORK, NY, Dec. 16, 2005 -- Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today announced the company continues to experience success in the retail industry adding leading brands Macy's and Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) to an already impressive customer roster that features Dillards, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. By addressing the changing consumer landscape and empowering retailers with market-leading business intelligence solutions, Information Builders has alleviated the mounting pressures retailers face while increasing organizational responsiveness and providing critical visibility into business operations.

Like many industries affected by the global economy, the retail industry has undergone a dramatic shift. The advent of the Internet has created a new consumer dynamic, where customers have access to more retail choices and more detailed product information than ever before. Retail organizations are also struggling to address the multi-channel shopper, who shops in a retailer's brick-and-mortar store, or their Web site, or through their catalog. While there may be more opportunity for customer interaction through each channel, there is an overwhelming amount of information retailers must now decipher. As a result, these organizations must be able to integrate their channels in order to address customer demands quickly. With business intelligence expertise from Information Builders, these world-class organizations can better understand their business information and react quickly to keep customers and contend with a broadened competitive landscape.

"You need more than just good reporting tools to monitor today's retail operations," said Richard Pedott, vice president of planning and allocation at Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS). "You also need hooks into the production information systems to monitor events, gather current data, and combine it all in a cohesive way. That's what we get from Information Builders."

Recent Information Builders retail industry successes include:

* EMS -- a leading outdoor specialty retailer -- uses the power of business intelligence from Information Builders to provide a unified view of key performance indicators such as sales, inventory, and margin levels, to decisions-makers in near-real time, enabling maximum sales opportunities

* Macy's -- America's department store chain -- which uses a self-service application through WebFOCUS that enables several hundred geographically-dispersed users to get visibility into promotion effectiveness and inventory status for successful advertising placement and product decisions

* Arcadia Group - one of Europe's largest independent clothing retailers -- leverages the power of WebFOCUS to integrate and manage performance for all seven of the company's popular clothing brands, exploiting operational efficiencies and propagating best practices

Information Builders also leverages a strategic relationship with leading integration firm Sky IT Group to bring value to each retail organization. Sky IT Group specializes in providing business intelligence solutions to the apparel manufacturing and retail industries and collaborates with Information Builders to deliver the most successful business intelligence implementation. Retailers such as Valentino, Garan, and Nautica are joint customers using Information Builders' technology to grow their businesses.

"Historically, the retail market has never been an industry focused on technology innovation, however the changing customer landscape has forced retailers to put IT front and center," said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. "Each retailer has needs specific to their market segment and customer base, but they all require intelligent insight into their business, which is why so many retail organizations have come to Information Builders for over 30 years as we provide the critical business visibility they need."

About Information Builders

Information Builders, a $300 million company, is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time operational reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product -- the industry's most scalable, 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 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 1,750 people and has over 350 business partners. For more information, visit http://www.informationbuilders.com.