Business Objects Delivers Business Intelligence Benefits to Handspring

SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 3, 2002 -- Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that Handspring, Inc. (Nasdaq:HAND), has implemented WebIntelligence(R) to provide its employees with online visibility into operational data across the entire organization. With WebIntelligence, the internet-based BI solution from Business Objects, Handspring has significantly increased its operational efficiency and reduced costs.

"Our company mission is to fundamentally change the way people organize, manage, and communicate," said Bhaskar Sayyaparaju, director of information technology at Handspring, Inc. "By utilizing business intelligence software from Business Objects, we are putting this philosophy into practice in our own operations. With WebIntelligence, we are better equipped to access and analyze the valuable data we collect from our manufacturing, e-commerce, finance, and customer relationship systems, thus improving our decision-making and reducing costs."

Handspring, a leading innovator in personal communications and handheld computers, employs a business model that relies on strategic partners to perform business tasks such as manufacturing and distribution. Because of this, Handspring receives data from partners in multiple formats and a variety of source systems. Handspring needed a way to consolidate and analyze this data to optimize corporate decision-making.

With the help of Saama Technologies, a consulting and technology services company and Business Objects reseller partner, Handspring merged its scattered corporate data into one cohesive data mart. To leverage this valuable data, Handspring evaluated several leading business intelligence solutions, including those from Cognos and Crystal Decisions, before selecting Business Objects as its BI platform.

Utilizing WebIntelligence and the data mart created by Saama, Handspring can now generate reports on items such as web orders, bookings, billings, backlog, and shipping activities in less than a day, instead of weeks. In addition, with direct access to the consolidated data via the internet or Handspring's corporate intranet, employees are no longer tapping the IT department for ad-hoc reports that previously took days to generate. Users can now run their own queries and quickly perform analyses on the data that is important to them, increasing operational efficiency, improving insight into the business, and reducing costs.

Handspring has gained several significant benefits from their business intelligence implementation. In addition to improvements in operational efficiency, such as now being able to close the company's books and finalize quarterly financial statements in half the time it used to take, there have been several unique benefits from the WebIntelligence deployment. For example, Handspring receives a large number of product orders via its web site and must continually monitor these orders to detect fraudulent activity. In the past, due to scattered data and report backlogs in the IT department, it was hard to track orders to identify trends in the data. Using WebIntelligence, Handspring's credit analysts now have easy access to the order data to run ad-hoc queries and reports on their own -- allowing them to spot trends more quickly.

"WebIntelligence has made our job of identifying trends in fraudulent activity a whole lot easier," said Mike Paneitz, senior credit analyst at Handspring. "We are now able to get instant results with the streamlined data access. When we detect a pattern change within fraud activity, we can more quickly adjust to the new MO, increasing the effectiveness of fraud analysis and more importantly fraud prevention at Handspring."

About Saama Technologies

Saama Technologies, Inc., a leading consulting and technology services company provides its services in three emerging areas of the new e-economy including Business Intelligence, e-Commerce, Relationship Management. Saama's solutions enable its clients to connect with their employees, customers and partners across their extended enterprise. Saama's expertise is focused in four industry segments: government/utilities, financial services, high-tech and retail.

Saama's headquarters are located in Campbell, Calif., and has an offshore development center in Mumbai, India. www.saama.com

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 data integration tools, the industry's leading integrated business intelligence platform, and a suite of enterprise analytic applications. Business Objects is the first to offer a complete BI solution that is composed of best-of-breed components, giving organizations the means to deploy end-to-end BI to the enterprise, from data extraction to analytic applications.

Business Objects has more than 16,000 customers in over 80 countries. The company's stock is publicly traded under the ticker symbols NASDAQ: BOBJ and Euronext Paris (Euroclear 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.

Note to Editors: WebIntelligence is a registered trademark of Business Objects SA. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

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      CONTACT: Business Objects
               Peter Olson, 408/953-6320
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