BOCA RATON, Fla., March 06, 2007 -- Information Builders, the leader in production business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that Florida Atlantic University (FAU) has selected Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence platform to allow users at any level to have consistent, reliable, and easy access to institutional data for reporting, trend analysis, forecasting, and other types of business analytics.

Colleges and universities are a unique business, with a mix of several diverse education and administrative departments, each using their own combination of different data systems. The benefit of deploying business intelligence technology at an educational institution is found in how the software allows individuals to turn the data held within administrative systems into valuable knowledge that can be instrumental to strategic planning and decision-making processes. WebFOCUS is able to accomplish numerous challenging tasks due to its tremendous flexibility in accessing a variety of data types simultaneously and efficiently through native data adapters.

Information Builders and its technology partner SunGard Higher Education have enabled FAU to create a dynamic solution that allows the university to create comprehensive applications for budgeting, human resources, payroll, and finance users. FAU also recently deployed WebFOCUS’ ReportCaster, which will allow the school to schedule, distribute, and share information and reports to selective staff, faculty, and students by e-mail, which will direct them to data in report libraries and Web servers.

"We are excited about our partnership with Information Builders, and given the level of commitment already demonstrated by both parties, we feel this relationship will continue to flourish,” said Dr. Jeff Schilit, chief information officer of Information Resource Management (IRM) at FAU. “We also truly believe that the WebFOCUS solution provides us with much needed tools to better mine our data and to generate real-time reports in easy to view and understand formats."

By exploiting the powerful capabilities of the solution, FAU has been able to create visually appealing, campus-wide self-service reporting applications that users access within an intuitive dashboard interface. These applications enable users to dynamically create simple to complex ad hoc reports with operational drill-down capabilities, conditional color-coding, and multiple output support in a Web-based GUI environment that includes self-documenting pop-up field capabilities. All of this can be accomplished without the need for IT intervention.

“Information Builders showed its attentiveness to its customers’ needs and requirements through this process,” said Carol Sashi, FAU’s associate director of Business Intelligence Technology Services (BITS). “I would recommend WebFOCUS to any department within the FAU community as well as other higher education institutions.”

By October 2007, FAU plans to extend the use of WebFOCUS to the student module of the SunGard Higher Education Banner solution by developing custom student reports that will securely detail students’ grades and on campus activities. Next, FAU will look to see how the WebFOCUS performance management and balanced scorecard solution can assist FAU management with achieving strategic goals by assessing and proactively reacting to key operational measures.

“Information Builders is proud to see Florida Atlantic University harnessing the power of business intelligence," said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. “Education is the cornerstone for success. This is a great example of how technology has empowered a leading university to reach a new level of understanding of its data and is using it in an innovative way allowing the school to make better decisions about its current operations and future growth, both from a student and administrative standpoint.”

About FAU

Florida Atlantic University opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the University serves more than 26,000 undergraduate and graduate students on seven campuses strategically located along 150 miles of Florida's southeastern coastline. Building on its rich tradition as a teaching university, with a world-class faculty, FAU hosts nine colleges: the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters, the Charles E. Schmidt College of Biomedical Science, the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, the Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing, the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, the Barry Kaye College of Business and the Colleges of Education, Engineering & Computer Science, and Architecture, Urban & Public Affairs.

About Information Builders

Information Builders, 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 31 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 1,600 people and has over 350 business partners.

Contacts 
Information Builders
Kathleen Moran, 917-339-6313
kathleen_moran@ibi.com