Information Builders Announces WebFOCUS 5

New Release Sets the Standard for Enterprise Business Intelligence by Supporting a Greater Number of Users, Enabling More Applications, and Empowering a More Diverse User Community

New York, NY – February 4, 2003 – Information Builders, the leader in enterprise business intelligence (BI) and real-time Web reporting, today introduced WebFOCUS 5, the newest release of its flagship solution. WebFOCUS 5 sets the standard for enterprise business intelligence by delivering more than 450 new features that ensure unparalleled performance and maximum three-way scalability – scaling to support more users, more applications, and a broader and more diverse user base than any other solution on the market today.

This new Java™ Servlet-based implementation significantly minimizes hardware requirements while providing a completely “open” environment that allows WebFOCUS 5 to deliver content to any third-party portals. Server clustering, multi-tiered processing, and load balancing guarantee optimum performance, even as system demands for real-time reports continue to grow. In addition, new facilities that "push" information based on schedules or alerts have been enhanced to enable all content – not just WebFOCUS reports – to be created, distributed, and archived.

Key enhancements include:
* Comprehensive information management and delivery – WebFOCUS 5 streamlines information distribution, storage, and retrieval and now includes the ability to deliver all content on a scheduled or alert basis, including WebFOCUS and third-party reports, image files, word processing documents, and presentations to individuals and a library for efficient and cost-effective archiving in any relational database.
* Closed-loop business intelligence – WebFOCUS 5 empowers users not only to receive information, but also to act on it immediately. Through a single, integrated environment, business intelligence systems can be enhanced with transactional forms and data maintenance capabilities, enabling users to update information from their browsers. WebFOCUS 5 can update any data source it reports from, so a user can drill down from a report and get a form to fill out for updating data, all with the same software.
* Support for Web services – Any WebFOCUS report can be created and published as a Web service callable from J2EE™ or .Net environments so robust business intelligence content can be seamlessly integrated into any application, regardless of architecture.
* Improved financial reporting capabilities – Organizations can address their most crucial financial reporting needs and easily comply with new and more stringent government mandates for financial reporting. WebFOCUS 5 dramatically simplifies creation and maintenance of complex financial reports such as profit and loss statements and balance sheets by dynamically reading the chart of accounts. Through every step of the financial reporting process – from data consolidation and report generation to analysis, forecasting, distribution, and archiving – financial professionals can now spend more time planning and less time validating, justifying, and auditing.
* End user query and analysis – Power user improvements include pure thin-client tools that enable organizations to deploy ad hoc and OLAP capabilities on a broad scale to users through the extended enterprise. An enhanced intuitive interface empowers nontechnical business users to quickly and easily generate all types of ad hoc reports, including parameterized (self-service) reports, and complex queries to conduct in-depth analysis using nothing more than a Web browser, with no plug-ins required.

WebFOCUS 5 – with all its new features – is the only business intelligence solution that operates on all major platforms, including MVS, Linux, UNIX, NT, and AS/400.

According to Howard Dresner, vice president and research director at Gartner, "Through 2004, more than 50 percent of Global 2000 enterprises will fail to use BI properly, losing market share to those that use BI correctly." The latest release of WebFOCUS helps organizations meet this challenge by providing a single integrated solution with a complete feature set that includes enterprise reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, portal integration, and extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) capabilities for building data marts and warehouses. All this robust functionality can be utilized to address enterprise-wide information needs so business intelligence can be strategically deployed to make critical, real-time data accessible to all levels and types of decision-makers, including executives and managers, employees and knowledge workers, and analysts and power users, as well as external users.

"Organizations are increasingly selecting WebFOCUS as their standard for delivering information internally, as well as to their customers, suppliers, and partners," said Gerald Cohen, president of Information Builders. "Our corporate mission is to harness the power of the Web to provide users with the information and insight they need to streamline operations, proactively address potential problems, meet regulatory and legislative demands, and – most importantly – drive profitability."

WebFOCUS in Action
Leading organizations, such as Ford, Royal Bank of Canada, FedEx, and NASA are already reaping the benefits of WebFOCUS. One such example, Administaff, a well-established and respected leader in the professional employer organization (PEO) industry, plans to utilize Information Builders' WebFOCUS 5.

Currently Administaff uses WebFOCUS to help manage their reporting environment through a single facility. Predefined menus and routines give client-users the ability to produce consistent, accurate, and secure reports via the Web. This reporting system expands the functionality for users while offering broad data access. WebFOCUS allows Administaff to provide clients with secure access to personnel-related reports on payroll, employee benefits, and other types of human resources information. Information Builders' technology facilitates easy integration with third-party systems that include security tables from other sources, and it also takes advantage of database-level security functions. Additionally, the software gives Administaff flexibility for authorizing users while protecting sensitive data.

We have been very pleased with our use of WebFOCUS, and we are looking forward to implementing the new version," says David Dickson, vice president and chief technology officer at Administaff. "The Information Builders team has been very proactive in helping us meet the objectives we set for our Web-reporting services. It's clear they are very interested in our success. Information Builders is one of the best technology vendors we have worked with."

About Information Builders
Information Builders is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product – the industry's most secure and flexible – meets all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. 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 27 years to more than 11,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,900 people, has over 350 business partners, and generated revenues exceeding $300 million in 2001. For more information, visit www.informationbuilders.com.

All names or trademarks or registered trademarks mentioned in the above document are assumed to be property of their respective companies.

Press Contact:
Jon Stotts
Information Builders
(917) 339-5442
jon_stotts@ibi.com