NEW YORK, March 14, 2005 -- Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, announced that The Hillman Group, a major manufacturer and distributor of small hardware products, recently selected WebFOCUS as its enterprise BI standard. The Hillman Group chose Information Builders as its reporting standard based on the software's ability to scale to meet the diverse needs of its users as well as its ability to work with a diverse set of IT systems -- both existing and future.

The Hillman Group is a leading manufacturer of key making equipment and distributor of key blanks, fasteners, signage, and other small hardware components and operates in multiple channels of the retail marketplace such as hardware stores, national and regional home centers, and mass merchants. Hillman's primary operations are located in Cincinnati, OH.

Jim Honerkamp, CIO for The Hillman Group, is working to improve his company's IT environment. The addition of WebFOCUS as the enterprise BI standard is a significant step in that direction. "We were looking for a better way to integrate existing applications and resources to create one encompassing view of our enterprise," says Honerkamp. "Hillman is in an aggressive acquisition mode right now, so we expect rapid change in the near term. We had to have a product that was flexible enough to accept that change. Not only did we find that WebFOCUS would be able to meet those needs, we also expect it to outperform other BI options based on its native data access and presentation layer."

Hillman researched reporting offerings from Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle, and IBM before choosing to go with Information Builders. WebFOCUS will be used to create an integrated view of Hillman's operations and finances. Within Hillman's IT environment, WebFOCUS for Linux will run on IBM iSeries as part of a Web-centric portal delivery infrastructure, accessing separate data warehouse, ERP, order management, and HR systems. Data will be refreshed two to three times a day, improving latency issues up to 83 percent. Over 100 IT and business users will be able to access the reports over the Internet from any browser.

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, has over 350 business partners.

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