Business Objects Launches
BusinessObjects Application Foundation
Industry's First Analytic Application Framework Designed Specifically For Building Integrated Enterprise Analytic Applications
San Jose, Calif. - July 10, 2001. Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJ), the world's leading provider of business intelligence solutions, today announced Business Objects Application Foundation, a revolutionary analytic application framework that lets businesses quickly and easily develop powerful, integrated enterprise analytic applications. Application Foundation is the cornerstone of BusinessObjects Analytics, the company's suite of integrated enterprise analytic applications.
BusinessObjects Application Foundation includes the following key components:
| Application Builder, an easy-to-use application development tool for building web-based analytic applications. |
| Advanced Analytic Engines, three powerful analytic engines for performing set-based analysis, time series analysis, and the specification and execution of advanced business rules. |
| Analytics Catalog, a collection of more than 70 pre-built analytic templates that provide reusable analysis techniques to be used as building blocks for creating analytic applications. |
"As a customer of Business Objects, we are very pleased to see the introduction of BusinessObjects Application Foundation," said Andrew Clyne, vice president, technology and architecture services at MasterCard. "Their framework and analytic templates would allow us to build upon our existing Business Objects infrastructure. This additional analytic capability from Business Objects will further enhance our range of global services we provide over the internet."
"Analytic applications will co-exist with business intelligence tools," said Henry Morris, VP for Applications and Information Access at IDC. "Analytic applications are specialized, supporting a structured business process, while business intelligence tools are generic, supporting ad hoc user inquiries. Business Objects, one of the leading providers of business intelligence tools, recognizes that one approach cannot fulfill both sets of needs. The Business Objects analytic application foundation, incorporating powerful engines such as set-based analysis, should help their customers build structured analytic applications with significant business value."
BusinessObjects Application Foundation is the cornerstone of the Business Objects analytic applications strategy. Customers can use Application Foundation both to develop their own custom analytic applications as well as to customize analytic applications modules within BusinessObjects Analytics. Using Application Foundation, customers can pursue a "build and buy" analytic applications strategy, buying certain applications off the shelf, building others, and having them work all together. Prepackaged analytic applications offer the advantages of faster time to deployment, faster return on investment, and packaged best-practice analytics. Custom analytic applications offer the ability to provide sustainable competitive advantage and to solve business problems highly specific to a particular company or industry.
Application Builder Overview
The Application Builder provides an easy to use development environment for both building web-based applications quickly from ready-made components or customizing purchased applications. It provides an intuitive point-and-click process for assembling components from the analytic catalog, enabling users to build applications without having to learn a programming language. Users can quickly define the look-and-feel elements of applications such as menus, tabs, company colors, and graphics. This means that application developers don't waste time figuring out how to build the application from code and can quickly develop and deploy powerful applications to end users via an intranet or the internet, as well as to customers and partners via an extranet.
Advanced Analytic Engines Overview
Application Foundation includes three powerful engines that provide the critical analysis functions of any application. The set-based analysis, time-series analysis, and business rules engines give unprecedented power to an organization's home-grown applications by providing the underlying technology that enable users to quickly segment their data in the most meaningful way, analyze these segments over time to spot critical change patterns, and turn this analysis into action.
| Set-based analysis. Sets enable businesses to categorize data into useful business groupings, such as customer segments, or product categories, to make analysis easy. These business groupings are typically what managers care most about, such as "most valuable customers" or "high margin products with decreasing stock turns" and save managers time and complexity in analyzing business performance by predefining the data to be analyzed. |
| Time series analysis. The time series analysis engine enables business managers to easily understand how the business or a particular part of the business is changing over time. Hard-wired analytic techniques simplify complicated analyses such as trending, relative change between metrics, and seasonal variance, for non-technical end users. |
| · Business rules. The business rules engine enables users to build key performance indicator (KPI) monitors into each application. This means that the end users can monitor key business metrics against a pre-set threshold and send automatic notification of changes to the appropriate business manager. For example a sales executive could monitor actual revenues compared to the forecast and set an alert so that she receives an email when the actual is behind the target by more than 10 percent. In addition, the business rules engine can provide closed-loop action such as feeding data into operational systems for corrective action, e.g., automatically send the records of those customers who have decreased their spending into Siebel Marketing Enterprise 2000.3 to generate a marketing campaign. |
Analytics Catalog Overview
Application Foundation includes more than 70 pre-built analytic templates. Analytic templates are reusable, generic analysis techniques for building applications that solve a broad range of business problems. The analytic templates can be applied to answer the most difficult business questions while shielding the end user from the complexity of the underlying technology. The analytics catalogue is open and extensible, enabling users to add their own analytic templates.
"In developing the first modules of BusinessObjects Analytics, we quickly realized that creating an integrated, consistent suite requires that the applications be built within a common framework. We created BusinessObjects Application Foundation to fulfill that need," said Dave Kellogg, senior group vice president of worldwide marketing at Business Objects. "We have developed all our analytic application modules using Application Foundation, and have found it enormously useful both in improving application development productivity and in delivering analytic applications that all look, feel, and act in the same way. For example, thanks to Application Foundation, we can provide a consistent method for performing time-series analysis regardless of whether the user is analyzing sales performance, customer retention, or employee attrition over time."
In addition to providing the framework for building applications, Business Objects is announcing BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence, the first analytic application of BusinessObjects Analytics. [Editors' note: please see related press release titled Business Objects Launches BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence, dated July 10, 2001.]
Platforms and Availability
BusinessObjects Application Foundation 2.1 is generally available and runs on Windows NT and Sun Solaris.
Business Objects product inquiries should contact 800-527-0580.