Business Objects Releases Crystal Version 10 Products

Crystal Version 10 Extends the Boundaries of Enterprise Reporting and Delivers Breakthrough Productivity

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 8, 2004 -- Business Objects, the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced the general availability of the Version 10 Suite of Crystal products.

The new release marks a significant enhancement to the suite's proven reporting and information delivery technology, which forms a critical foundation for successful BI deployments worldwide. Crystal Version 10 extends the power, openness, and scalability of the industry's leading reporting solution, and establishes Business Objects as the de facto choice for both enterprise and embedded reporting.

"With more than 15 years of focus on reporting and tens of thousands of successful deployments, we're confident that we have once again set the standard for reporting with this new release, " said William Gibson, senior vice president at Business Objects. "We've made tremendous advances in this release that will help our customers meet virtually any reporting requirement, and will scale to address the needs of the entire enterprise."

The version 10 suite of Crystal products combines Crystal Enterprise, one of the industry's most scalable and reliable enterprise reporting platforms, with the powerful report design capabilities of Crystal Analysis and Crystal Reports, the world-standard for high-productivity reporting. Together, the Version 10 Suite of Crystal products provide organizations with the ability to make better, faster decisions for improved business performance.

New innovations and enhanced reporting

Building on the proven success of the Crystal Analysis, Crystal Enterprise, and Crystal Reports product lines, Version 10 combines Crystal's mature reporting architecture with a host of new innovations focused on usability, integration, and manageability. The Crystal Version 10 product suite includes the following new capabilities:

-- Extends the value of reporting to business users by providing greater end-user interactivity and tighter integration with Microsoft Office.

-- Provides broader application integration options with a new Java report engine and advanced controls for Visual Studio.NET developers.

-- Increases the performance and scalability of the industry's leading web-native reporting infrastructure with dramatic performance gains across Windows and UNIX platforms, large-scale administration capabilities, and a new architecture for data access.

Lower total cost of ownership

"Crystal Version 10 will enable us to quickly and easily deploy a BI solution throughout our entire organization," said Tim Sahouri, vice president of Information Services at Medcor. "Because this is a completely integrated offering, we are not forced to mix and match disparate products to meet our business requirements. Business Objects has done all the planning and integration on the back-end, which means we have much less work to do on the front-end. This allows us to reduce our total cost of ownership by consolidating our BI investments."

Crystal Version 10 provides the following capabilities:

-- Provides the power to meet virtually any reporting requirement -- both from a developer and an end-user perspective.

-- Allows companies to leverage their existing IT investments and integrate with existing applications, using Java, .NET, or COM technology.

-- Delivers proven scalability, reliability, and performance, with an architecture that is deployed by over 25,000 customers and tested under stringent lab and real-world deployment scenarios.

Taking enterprise reporting to new heights

Version 10 features all the hallmarks of Crystal's proven enterprise reporting system: powerful authoring, an open architecture, and industry-leading scalability. "With a new 100% Java reporting engine, dashboard-building components for .NET developers, and cross-platform support, this release sends a clear signal that traditional enterprise reporting is only part of the game," said Dan Vesset, senior analyst, business intelligence and data warehousing, IDC. "Using reporting technology to speed application development projects is an important new direction for leading organizations."

In conjunction with the launch, Business Objects is also introducing two new professional accreditation programs to maximize an organization's effectiveness when deploying the Version 10 Suite of Crystal products. For more information on the Crystal Enterprise Certified Professional (CECP) program and the Crystal Reports Certified Professional (CRCP) program, visit the Business Objects web site.

Crystal Version 10 a critical component of future product plans

Crystal Reports, Crystal Enterprise, and Crystal Analysis will be core components of the new integrated product line. For more information on the Business Objects product integration roadmap, please see the press release and white paper on this topic at www.businessobjects.com.

About Business Objects

Business Objects is the world's leading business intelligence (BI) software company. Business Objects enables organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise performance. The company's solutions leverage the information that is stored in an array of corporate databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Popular uses of BI include enterprise reporting, management dashboards and scorecards, customer intelligence applications, financial reporting, and both customer and partner extranets. These solutions enable companies to gain visibility into their business, acquire and retain profitable customers, reduce costs, optimize the supply chain, increase productivity, and improve financial performance.

In December 2003, Business Objects completed the acquisition of Crystal Decisions, the leader in enterprise reporting. The combined product line includes software for reporting, query and analysis, performance management, analytic applications, and data integration. In addition, Business Objects offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively deploy their business intelligence projects.

Business Objects has more than 24,000 customers in over 80 countries. The company's stock is traded under the ticker symbols NASDAQ: BOBJ and Euronext Paris (ISIN: FR0004026250 - BOB). 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.

BusinessObjects is a trademark of Business Objects S.A. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

  
Contacts  
 
Business Objects
Randy Cairns, 408/953-6036
randy.cairns@businessobjects.com
Ian Galbraith, 604/974-2370
ian.galbraith@businessobjects.com 
 
 
At A Glance 

Business Objects 
 
Headquarters: San Jose, CA 
Website: http://www.businessobjects.com 
CEO: Bernard Liautaud 
Employees: 2000+ 
Ticker : BOBJ (NASDAQ);  12074 (EURONEXT)  
Revenues : $454.8M (2002) 
Net Income : $40.6M (2002) 

Source: via Business Wire.
Updated 05/20/2003 by company.