Information Builders Demonstrates Solid Growth in 20055 February 2006
Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today announced the company has completed another year of growth marked by widespread customer adoption. Despite the market trend toward BI tool consolidation, Information Builders continues to thrive as WebFOCUS was selected over other leading BI applications to be the enterprise standard of choice for companies such as Lloyd's of London, Hillerick & Bradsby, Pierre Foods, University of North Carolina, and Winn Dixie. The company leads the operational business intelligence market through releasing innovative products such as WebFOCUS Active Reports and WebFOCUS 7; expanding technology partnerships with BEA, IBM, and SAP; and securing over 200 new customers. In addition, the company also was positioned in the leader quadrant of Gartner, Inc's "Magic Quadrant* for Business Intelligence Platform, 1QO6" report.
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Product Adoption
As industries consolidate and competition increases, more and more organizations are expanding the use of business intelligence across the enterprise. Frontline workers are now becoming BI users, increasing demand for large-scale BI deployments in support of operational BI initiatives. Unlike conventional business intelligence applications, operational BI extends high- quality, actionable business information to many different types of employees throughout the enterprise as well as to partners and customers outside the organization. By offering a unique pairing of BI and integration technology through the release of WebFOCUS 7, Information Builders continues to be at the forefront of operational BI, boasting customers such as Donato's Pizza, Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS), and La Petite Academy.
The launch of the industry's first portable reporting solution, WebFOCUS Active Reports, was also critical to spurring the adoption of operational business intelligence. By providing customers with the ability to manipulate and understand data through dynamic reports, regardless of their connection to a network, Information Builders has further broadened the impact of business intelligence for frontline workers whether they are on the shop floor, out in the sales field, or in the home office.
Due to Information Builders' commitment to addressing customer needs through innovative product enhancements, many global organizations have standardized on WebFOCUS over the past year including Hillman Group, Pharmascience, Weitz Company, and Vin & Spirits (V&S). These organizations selected WebFOCUS over other BI solutions based on the software's unique ability to run on multiple platforms and meet increasing demands for large- scale user deployments in real time.
Strategic Partnerships
Pioneering industry partnerships have also spurred innovative user implementations. ESRI, the geographic information system (GIS) software leader, partnered with Information Builders to more tightly integrate ESRI's mapping software with Information Builders' business intelligence software, in order to simplify reporting solutions. The combination has empowered over 30 joint customers to view additional layers of critical business information, delivering enhanced decision-making capabilities to users on the front lines in a graphical format.
Information Builders also partnered with SPSS, a worldwide provider of predictive analytics software. Together the two companies created and implemented an application that forecasts locations most likely to experience crime in a specified time period for the Virginia Police Department (RPD), enabling the RPD to predict crime in near real-time and thus deploy its forces accordingly. The partnership has been so successful SPSS honored Information Builders with a partner award of excellence.
The company has also continued to strengthen its relationship with IBM, launching major initiatives with IBM resellers to promote business intelligence on Linux. WebFOCUS is currently the only BI product to natively support Linux on all IBM server platforms, which include iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, the mainframe, and BladeCenter. In recognition of its efforts with IBM, the company was recently honored as one of IBM's 2006 PartnerWorld Beacon Award recipients.
Besides technology partnerships, Information Builders also continued to fortify relationships with systems integrators including Accenture, BearingPoint, and Deloitte.
Industry Accolades
In 2005, Information Builders received numerous industry accolades. Ventana Research released the successful results of an evaluation putting Information Builders' extensive scalability capabilities to the test at two ultra-large scale organizations, Ford Motor Company and a leading U.S. bank. U.K.-based analyst firm Butler Group recognized WebFOCUS as an ideal platform for the development of enterprise BI applications due to on the software's broad functionality, strong data access capabilities, standards-based enterprise application integration facilities, and overall scalability.
The media community also recognized Information Builders through various editorial awards, including Crain's New York Top Private Technology Company, CRM Magazine's 2005 CRM Market Leader, DATA IT Best Product of the Year, DM Review 2005 Readership Merit awards, and the Intelligent Enterprise Company to Watch. Also, four of Information Builders' customers' applications were recommended by the Chairmen's Committee of the Computerworld Honors Program for inclusion in the prestigious Smithsonian Institution's Permanent Research Collection for extending the benefits of technology to society. Out of those four nominees, MedStar was named a finalist.
iWay Software
Information Builders' subsidiary, iWay Software continued its momentum in the application integration market based on the release of highly anticipated products and an increase in customer adoption. In 2005, the company launched the iWay Adaptive Framework, which incorporates years of middleware and solutions-architecture expertise to provide the foundation of an enterprise's service-oriented architecture (SOA). The framework is a suite of productivity tools and over 300 packaged adapters that allows IT to increase its productivity and its ability to make a business more competitive. The suite has enabled users such as Novelis to create services from individual applications, aggregate them into business services, and incorporate them into Web and portal composite applications and B2B scenarios as well as integration with a partner's integration brokers and BPM tools. Today iWay Software launched iWay SOA Middleware(TM), its comprehensive enterprise integration product suite that enables customers to make their entire IT infrastructure more open, more flexible, and more easily aligned with business requirements.
In addition, iWay Software continued to add capabilities such as ETL and GIS to its already impressive roster of attributes, seamlessly linking stores of information with Information Builders' BI software and directly addressing the market demand for a simple approach to merge BI and integration tools.
iWay further solidified its commitment to the SOA movement by joining the Eclipse Foundation, an open source community dedicated to the implementation of a universal development platform. By leveraging the new iWay plugs-ins for Eclipse, organizations can seamlessly interconnect Java(TM) composite applications to the iWay Adaptive Framework, further solidifying the company's directive to simplify enterprise integration.
Forrester recognized Information Builders and iWay Software's DataMigrator as a strong performer in the enterprise ETL-tools market and applauded its high scalability and advanced connectivity. The company also received an Award for Excellence(TM) from the Integration Consortium (IC) based on an intense demonstration during the IC 500 Summit where vendors leveraged skills and technology to deliver a real-time supply-chain solution using SOA-based business integration technology in just over 24 hours.
Continued Momentum
"The past year proved to be another critical adoption phase for operational business intelligence as companies transferred the power of business intelligence to more business users," said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "The demand for operational business intelligence and thus integration technologies will persist in 2006. Information Builders will continue to provide innovative applications to address our customers' complex demands through effective business strategies, best-of-breed technology solutions, and world-class customer support."
About iWay Software
iWay Software, an Information Builders company, accelerates business integration by providing tools that make service-oriented architectures easy to implement. Clients achieve short-term ROI by using iWay to reduce custom programming and to solve problems quickly, while incrementally creating an architecture that supports long-term projects. Many well-known software companies, including BEA and Microsoft, use iWay adapters to simplify access to ERP and CRM systems, messaging, legacy systems, e-business protocols like AS2 and ebXML, and more. Additional message transformation and data integration make iWay a natural integration choice -- standalone or with other middleware. For more information visit http://www.iwaysoftware.com.
About Information Builders
Information Builders, is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time operational reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product -- the industry's most scalable, 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 30 years to more than 12,000 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 and has over 350 business partners.
"Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms, 1Q06." Gartner Research. K. Schlegel, B. Hostmann, A. Bitterer, and B. Burton. January 9, 2006.
* Magic Quadrant Disclaimer: The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2006 by
Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a
graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time
period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure
against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner
does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic
Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those
vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended
solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to
action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with
respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or
fitness for a particular purpose.
Source: prnewswire
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