Business Objects Delivers Analytic Applications to Italian Postal Service

San Jose, Calif. - March 5, 2002 -- Business Objects (NASDAQ:BOBJ), the world’s leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that Poste Italiane, the newly privatized Italian postal service, has selected Business Objects to strengthen its service and relationships with customers. Poste Italiane purchased BusinessObjects™ Application Foundation, an analytic application framework, to build an analytic solution for use in its Call Center Unico Division.

As Poste Italiane improves the quality and competitiveness of its services, it understands the importance of leveraging information to improve customer relationships, cut costs, and remain competitive in the Italian mail service market. “BusinessObjects Application Foundation will help build a solution that will give us a better understanding of our market and the evolving behavior and needs of our customers,” said Giuseppe Pavone, head of Call Center Unico at Poste Italiane. “This will enable us develop new and better services and give us competitive advantage.”

The Call Center Unico is Poste Italiane’s contact center that delivers information on all Poste Italiane’s products and services: mail and parcels, financial services, and the post offices’ opening times. The Call Center Unico handles both inbound calls and outbound marketing campaigns. It serves all departments throughout Poste Italiane and acts as the single, multi-channel point of contact for all internal and external customers.

Call Center Unico employees will use analytic applications built with Application Foundation to track, segment, and analyze integrated information on its customer demographics, behavior, and needs, which it will then distribute to other divisions across the company. For example, an expert can use information from customer calls to identify all customers within an industry like banking that can also be targeted by another industry like insurance. Call Center Unico can then manage a marketing campaign targeted toward that group, and analyze the results. This analysis will enable Poste Italiane to have more direct relationships with its customers, improved marketing campaigns and telesales, products and services based on the divisions’ different marketing strategies, and increased customer retention.

“Thanks to Application Foundation, Poste Italiane will be able to offer new services to our customers,” said Marco Marcone, CRM manager, Call Center Unico at Poste Italiane. “We will become ever closer to the customers and their needs because we will be able to develop a true understanding of the market.”

About Poste Italiane SpA
Poste Italiane S.p.A., with 172,000 employees and 14,000 post offices, is one of the country’s main corporations. It guarantees universal postal service in Italy and offers financial services throughout the country. The company’s commitment to renew itself began with the 1998-2002 Business Plan, which includes over 150 projects and foresees the development of all business areas (mail, express-logistics-parcel and Postbank) and the improvement of the quality of services.

The range of postal products includes Priority Mail, Ordinary Mail, Registered Mail, International Mail, business mail (printed matter, catalogues, un-addressed mailings, direct mailings), packages and telegrams. In co-operation with the Communications Ministry, Poste Italiane handles the sale of postal revenue stamps.

Poste Italiane also offers three different ways of sending packages according to delivery timing, costs, weight and size. With the Bancoposta services, Poste Italiane ensures payment and saving services throughout Italy. In these past two years there has been a considerable effort to enrich, complete and innovate the traditional Bancoposta offering with new products as the Bancoposta account, bonds, life insurance products, loans. Many BancoPosta services are also available on the www.poste.it website, which is a proper online post office.

Poste Italiane controls 100% of the share capital in Postecom, the company that manages the Internet services of Poste Italiane; in PosteVita, which offers life-insurances through the post office network; in SDA, which operates in the express courier, logistics and electronic-commerce business and Postel, the European leader in “hybrid” e-mail and document processing.

About Business Objects
Business Objects is the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions. Business intelligence lets organizations access, analyze, and share information internally with employees and externally with customers, suppliers, and partners. It helps organizations improve operational efficiency, build profitable customer relationships, and develop differentiated product offerings.

The company's products include BusinessObjects™ 2000, the industry's leading integrated business intelligence toolset and platform; and BusinessObjects™ Analytics, an integrated suite of enterprise analytic applications.

Business Objects pioneered the modern BI industry in 1990 by inventing a patented "semantic layer" that insulates users from the complexity of databases. In 1995, the company was first to focus on enterprise-scale BI deployments and today supports customers with more than 20,000 users. The company moved aggressively to the internet in 1997 by pioneering the market for BI extranets, a market that it continues to lead today. In 2000, the company delivered the industry's first interactive mobile BI solution. Today, Business Objects continues to innovate, creating and delivering a unique vision for enterprise analytic applications.

Business Objects has more than 15,000 customers in over 80 countries. The company's stock is publicly traded under the ticker symbols NASDAQ: BOBJ and Euronext Paris (Sicovam code 12074). It is included in the SBF 120 and IT CAC 50 French stock market indexes. Business Objects can be reached at 408-953-6000 and www.businessobjects.com