Business Objects Announces BusinessObjects Broadcast Agent 5.5Powerful New Information Delivery Features Provide Complete Enterprise Reporting and Analysis for Full Range of UsersSan Jose, Ca, -- May 15, 2002 -- Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJ), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced the general availability of BusinessObjects™ Broadcast Agent 5.5, the newest version of the company's intelligent enterprise information delivery server that delivers timely and personalized information via multiple devices. Broadcast Agent 5.5 includes enhanced performance, automated delivery processes, and intelligent navigation features, thus enabling customers to deliver more information to more users in less time. This in turn allows companies to easily extend business intelligence to all types of users within the enterprise. In January 2002 Business Objects acquired Blue Edge Software, a UK-based software company that developed innovative information delivery solutions based on BusinessObjects, the industry's leading integrated query, reporting, and analysis tool for the enterprise. Business Objects used this acquired technology to enhance the information delivery capabilities of its enterprise BI suite, enabling companies to pre-process information for mass delivery and extend the best practices of data analysis. Broadcast Agent 5.5 is part of BusinessObjects 2000, the company's strategic BI platform and integrated BI toolset, and thus enables companies to meet all their reporting requirements from within one BI infrastructure. This helps customers to leverage their existing BI investment and simplifies the delivery of focused and relevant information to a range of end users, from those that simply want to read reports, to those who need ad hoc query and advanced analysis capabilities. "Customers demand one integrated solution to satisfy all their business intelligence and information delivery requirements, and Broadcast Agent 5.5 is the answer," said Crispin Read, vice president of product marketing at Business Objects. "This release closes the gap between enterprise reporting and business intelligence; now users can more easily graduate from simple static report consumption to rich analytics all from within one enterprise BI suite." "We use products from Business Objects, including Broadcast Agent, to give our sales force and company executives access to sales and inventory information," said Tom Collard, information systems director at TaylorMade-adidas Golf, one of the largest golf club manufacturers in the world. "Before Business Objects, we had a huge report backlog, with several IT people spending all their time creating reports and trying to reduce the backlog. Now, users can easily create their own report, taking the IT report backlog from 400 man days to zero." With improved performance, simplified information delivery, and intelligent navigation, Broadcast Agent 5.5 extends business intelligence to more types of users, giving them the key business information and the appropriate analytic functionality to match their job level and analysis needs. Improved performance provides more information to a mass audience
in less time For example, a daily sales report to be distributed to the entire field can now be run with one query to the database. The report is automatically distributed to the individual end users, with each sales representative simply receiving the data that they are authorized to see, specifically their territory's figures and the total sum. New, automated processes simplify mass information delivery This means users can be less dependent on the availability of the IT department, and IT in turn can more easily manage the information delivery infrastructure and tune the scheduling of major reports. This liberates them from creating, maintaining, and distributing all reports and allows them to focus on other strategic tasks. Intelligent navigation extends the benefit of analysis to more end
users For example, a product manager looking at a product margin report could click on a particular product line and go to the same slice of information in an inventory report. He could then with one click navigate into historical versions of the same report, again maintaining the context, to spot potential trends in inventory levels. This guided analysis makes it easy to make an informed decision on what product to promote in the next weekly campaign. "The new features of Broadcast Agent 5.5 look good, specifically the single refresh report bursting and the tight security that goes along with the personalized reports," continued Tom Collard of TaylorMade-adidas Golf. "Automating features such as the hyperlink navigation and the glossary creation will bring increased value to our end users and are in line with where I see us taking our BI solution." "The acquired Blue Edge technology brings significant new features
to the Business Objects BI suite," said Paul Grill, president and
CEO of InfoSol, a leading provider of business intelligence services and
solutions. "Giving customers intelligent bursting will make life
a lot easier for those who need to publish reports very quickly and effectively
to large numbers of users. In addition, helping users intelligently navigate
within and across reports will help companies provide BI benefits to a
more broad and varied user base." |