Information Builders Meets Customer Demand for Integrated Business Intelligence Platform

Powerful and Flexible Data Architecture Allows Organizations Such as the U.S. Air Force, NASA, Moneris, and ArvinMeritor to Fully Leverage Data Assets

NEW YORK, NY Sept. 8, 2003 -- Information Builders, the leader in enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions and real-time Web reporting, today announced ETL Manager and new integration capabilities to strengthen its fully integrated business intelligence suite. Recent acquisitions in the BI market validate the demands customers have for a single vendor to offer a complete, integrated business intelligence solution. As other companies in the market look to acquire tools and solutions to meet these requirements, Information Builders is the only vendor that provides a comprehensive BI and data management platform, which includes Information Builders' ETL Manager, Metadata Manager, and Resource Analyzer and Governor.

Customers, including NASA's Shuttle Processing Directorate at the Kennedy Space Center, Moneris, ArvinMeritor and the United States Air Force, are currently using Information Builders' BI and data management suites across their enterprise.

"As companies are faced with the challenge of managing more data types, applications and information, they need a way to effectively leverage their information assets," said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "Information Builders supplies a flexible data architecture that provides full support for the different access needs created by IT investments such as enterprise business intelligence, real-time reporting, business activity monitoring, and application integration projects."

Central Nervous System for Business Intelligence

There is a growing demand for the convergence of extraction, transfer, and loading (ETL), application integration, and business intelligence. In order to more fully leverage current infrastructure investments and automate processes, organizations want a BI platform that includes ETL and integration functionality.

ETL Manager is a powerful and comprehensive set of fully automated tools designed to simplify the creation, maintenance, and expansion of data warehouses, data marts, and operational data stores. ETL Manager comes out of the box with standard transformations, connectivity to many sources, and an easy-to-use interface that enables fast and flexible end-to-end ETL process creation. ETL Manager also makes access and migration of virtually all enterprise data seamless, since it employs industry-leading adapter technology from its subsidiary, iWay Software.

"Vendors like Business Objects and Cognos acquired technology to provide this offering and made it proprietary," said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "Information Builders developed an ETL solution that works in conjunction with our WebFOCUS suite, but also works with other vendor's technology, giving organizations more liberty with their IT investments."

NASA's Shuttle Processing Directorate needed to integrate seven different data sources and five operating systems in order to report on critical tasks regarding the safe and efficient processing of the Shuttle before launch.

"NASA does not own much of the data we need to get to, so the system we chose had to let the data owners be comfortable with providing access," said Ron Phelps, a project manager and former shuttle test director at Kennedy Space Center. "We also wanted a system that could mix and match data to produce a variety of business intelligence reports, while allowing the data providers to use tools they were comfortable with. And the system had to be able to grow as customer requirements increase and deliver reports in 15 seconds or less."

The Need for Real-Time Data Access

According to a Gartner report (June 2003) enterprise-wide access to corporate BI data is a top priority for many organizations. WebFOCUS supports more than 90 unique data types, providing the ability to pull data in real-time from multiple sources. Using the plug-and-play adapters from Information Builder' subsidiary, iWay Software, companies can achieve fast, efficient, and reusable access to any vendor's application, platform, data structure, or message type throughout its enterprise, and once this information is acquired, it can be used and reused across a number of IT initiatives beyond business intelligence, such as EAI, application development, and data warehousing.

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 -- is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, 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 28 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 1,750 people, has over 350 business partners, and generated revenues exceeding $300 million in 2002.

SOURCE Information Builders

Web Site: http://www.informationbuilders.com