NEW YORK, NY, January 15, 2007 -- With retail margins remaining razor thin, never has it been more important for retail companies of all sizes to become information-centric organizations that use data to make smart and timely business decisions. Retail companies worldwide are turning to Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ)(Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 - BOB), the world’s leading provider of business intelligence solutions, to gain a clear and complete view of key metrics, performance indicators, and analytics that support critical planning and informed decisions. Business Objects solutions deliver the accurate, relevant, and up-to-date analysis retailer need to spot trends and market shifts as they develop — and adapt proactively.

Business Objects works with more than 450 top retail companies, including eight of the top 10 global retailers, to improve decision making around brands, products, marketing, customers, supply chain, and overall operational efficiency. Business Objects retail customers span all segments of the industry, including mass discount, food, department store, specialty hard and soft goods, and quick service sectors. Business Objects has enjoyed significant momentum in the retail sector recently, with new or expanded deployments at companies including Advanced Auto Parts, Auchan, Overstock.com, Party City, Williams-Sonoma, and Zale Corporation.

One leading retailer that has standardized on Business Objects solutions is Rent-A-Center, the largest rent-to-own operator in the U.S. Rent-A-Center uses Business Objects business intelligence and enterprise performance management solutions to manage its significant expansion rate due to organic growth and major acquisitions.

“As we continue to grow, the amount of data we collect has expanded significantly, and Business Objects allows us to turn this information into an asset that can help us improve our company performance, and allows us to continue to grow intelligently,” said Tony Fuller, CIO of Rent-A-Center. “Business Objects has enabled us to consolidate, process, and analyze data from several disparate sources to gain insight into our customers and our merchandising efforts, among other things. Through analysis of inventory turn and promotion performance data, our merchandise managers can more easily make adjustments to our up-sell, cross-sell, and pricing strategies to help improve store performance.”

Creating Information-Centric Retail Organizations

Business Objects understands the complex challenges retailers face every day. BusinessObjects™ XI release 2 provides retailers with the most advanced and complete solution for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. Business Objects helps retailers become more information-centric, enabling them to:

Improve purchasing, forecasting, and distribution management Optimize product profitability, dramatically increase effectiveness, and reduce marketing campaign costs Identify and segment customers to expand retention strategies Integrate management and financial reporting to improve performance Reduce and control operational costs through optimized store performance Effectively service customers throughout the multichannel network Business Objects solutions provide significant value to retail organizations, and retail executives have taken notice. Business Objects was recently ranked as the top business intelligence vendor and one of the top ten software vendors in the retail industry based on a survey of senior retail executives conducted by RIS News.

“Information is the backbone of any successful retail organization, and information-centric companies use business intelligence to improve decision making and enable people throughout the organization to drive overall enterprise performance,” said Russ Hill, senior director of worldwide retail industry marketing at Business Objects. “Through work with our global customer base, Business Objects has gained a deep understanding of the key market drivers, emerging trends, and core opportunities that accelerate success at retail organizations. We work closely with our customers to deliver the right business intelligence solution to drive strong growth and achieve the bottom-line results needed to succeed in a competitive environment.”

Providing Additional Value to Customers through Strong Partnerships

Business Objects works closely with a host of top technology vendors to extend the value of its business intelligence solutions. Through tight integration and joint development efforts, Business Objects and its partners help retailers to more easily make sense of all their data. These partnerships provide the flexibility to enable Business Objects customers to choose the software that best suits their needs, while ensuring that Business Objects will support the connectivity between the two solutions. Several key partners in the retail industry include:

IBM

Business Objects and IBM have a strategic alliance that spans many industries. In retail, the two companies have jointly developed several solutions including a retail business intelligence solution, a retail market basket analysis solution, and a retail enterprise data warehouse. These solutions enable retailers to analyze high volumes of data to discover product associations, improve marketing campaigns, reduce customer attrition, optimize store assortment, improve merchandise management, and compare vendor performance. Steve Gordon, Retail Software Solutions Executive for IBM, will be in the Business Objects booth (#2237) at NRF on Monday at 2:00 p.m. to present a session titled “IBM: Hot Issues In Retail.”

Netezza

Business Objects and Netezza have partnered to create a powerful BI foundation to help companies fully leverage their enterprise data, and enable business users to quickly uncover strategic insights. The combination of the high-performance Netezza Performance Server® (NPS®) system and BusinessObjects XI Release 2 results in a powerful BI foundation that delivers the full spectrum of BI capabilities, including reporting, analytics, dashboards, and enterprise information management. In the retail space, this tight integration allows joint customers to analyze more detailed transactional data to better understand customer buying patterns and make more effective business decisions in areas such as CRM, merchandising, and supply chain management.

Teradata, a division of NCR

Business Objects and Teradata enjoy a strong partnership and have more than 300 joint customers. Business Objects has worked closely with Teradata to optimize its BI platform for use with Teradata solutions and the two companies have jointly developed an end-to-end BI offering for Teradata Retail Decisions on BusinessObjects XI Release 2. The combination of Business Objects BI tools and the Teradata® Warehouse delivers a safe and proven choice for retail organizations looking for enterprise BI deployments.

Business Objects at the National Retail Federation Conference

Business Objects will be holding product demonstrations in booth #2237 on the NRF tradeshow floor in New York, January 15-16, 2007. To discover more about Business Objects solutions for retail, please stop by the booth during NRF or visit http://www.businessobjects.com/retail/.

About Business Objects

Business Objects is the world’s leading business intelligence (BI) software company, with more than 39,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500. Business Objects helps organizations of all sizes create a trusted foundation for decision making, gain better insight into their business, and optimize performance. The company’s innovative business intelligence suite, BusinessObjects™ XI, offers the BI industry’s most advanced and complete solution for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. BusinessObjects XI includes the award-winning Crystal line of reporting and data visualization software. Business Objects has also built the industry’s strongest and most diverse partner community, and offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively deploy their business intelligence projects.

Business Objects has dual headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, France. The company’s stock is traded on both the Nasdaq (BOBJ) and Euronext Paris (ISIN: FR0004026250 - BOB) stock exchanges. More information about Business Objects can be found at www.businessobjects.com.

The Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Intelligent Question, and Xcelsius are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects in the United States and/or other countries. All other names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contacts 
Business Objects
Peter Olson, 408-953-6320 (Press)
peter.olson@businessobjects.com