Business Objects Awards Customers for Excellence in Business Intelligence
Business Objects International User Conference, Miami Beach, FL. - October 15, 2002 -- Today Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJ), the world’s leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, honored five companies who are using BI to gain a better understanding of their businesses and customers. This year’s winners - ABN AMRO Bank, EDS, France Telecom, Lands' End, and MasterCard International, represent diverse industries, but have one strength in common - they are driving the use of BI both inside and outside their organizations, to maximize business performance. As part of this year’s awards, Business Objects also presented the CIO Leadership award to Seijiro Suzuki of the Toshiba Corporation, for his leadership in overseeing a Business Objects deployment that extends to tens of thousands of users.
With over 16,000 customers, Business Objects is now a regular part of a successful corporation’s information technology arsenal,” said Bernard Liautaud, chief executive officer at Business Objects. It is our goal to partner with our customers to deliver solutions that provide true business value in all areas of a company’s business. We congratulate our five winners who have embraced our solutions and made BI a key in their global strategy to increase revenue, cost savings, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage. I also congratulate Mr. Suzuki of Toshiba Corporation, who demonstrated vision and leadership in overseeing a global Business Objects deployment at Toshiba.”
Following is a brief description of this year's winners:
ABN AMRO Bank: Business Objects is the enterprise BI standard at ABN AMRO Bank, based in the Netherlands, with more than 7,000 employees accessing, analyzing, and sharing reports daily. For example, the ABN AMRO Corporate Human Resources department, uses Business Objects to gain insight into its workforce by analyzing information on such items as gender, age, tenure, and compensation. ABN AMRO Bank also uses BusinessObjects™Application Foundation, an analytic application framework from Business Objects, to study employment patterns over time based on age, sex, and level of education. They can now, for example, measure the in and outflow of employees (internal and external), as well as migrations between departments to track career paths, and the difference in compensation between Strategic Business Units, departments, age groups, or between male and female. Human Resources executives all over the world can now perform online interactive analysis on key performance indicators important to the ABN AMRO organization. Thanks to the HR Insight application, the ABN AMRO HR Department is in a better position to demonstrate its performance and contribution to the business success of the
whole organization. HR Insight is a unique starting point to develop other insight modules based upon experiences seen by the application.
EDS: Electronic Data Systems Corporation is the leading global information technology (IT) services company. EDS integrates Business Objects as a strategic solution for users to pore through the vast volumes of data from state Medicaid agencies. With Business Objects solutions, state analysts have direct access to detailed and summarized information for the building of reports and answering “what if” legislative questions. Analysts use the EDS solution to perform quality of care studies, health program evaluations, financial auditing, as well as identifying fraud and abuse. The ease of use and timeliness of the EDS, Business Objects solution are the primary reasons for success. EDS has been a Business Objects customer since 1996, leveraging this scalable solution for many state health care clients.
France Telecom: In its BI standardization approach, France Telecom has selected Business Objects, with a three-year plan to deploy 70,000 licenses to nearly half of the company's total workstation population. Business Objects plays a key role in retrieving and analyzing data within human resources, finance management, marketing, sales, and networks, and has assisted the company in adopting a more global approach to management. With Business Objects, France Telecom has seen an increase in the overall productivity now that employees can access information from its mass of customer, product, and market data - making France Telecom more competitive and collaborative with customers and suppliers. The corporate contract signed with Business Objects has also enabled substantial savings on license fees, now accrued at the corporate level, and a huge reduction in user training and support costs. Applications are easier to deploy, upgrade, and maintain, saving time and money. Once the decision has been made to standardize around Business Objects, a Business Objects Skill Center” was created for overseeing the business intelligence implementation. It is also its job to ensure and maintain the consistency of projects involving Business Objects, and ensure that each of the different teams share best practices.
Land' End: A leading direct retailer, Lands' End relies on BusinessObjects™ Analytics, the suite of integrated enterprise analytic applications from Business Objects, to monitor information related to catalog and internet sales, track merchandise levels, and assist in analyzing large volumes of customer behavior data. Using BusinessObjects Customer Intelligence, the Lands' End Business Outfitters management team has additional insight into which items customers are buying, and who's responding to a particular campaign. Lands' End can then target future campaign to a particular customer segment, based on what it purchased in the past. In addition, Lands' End used BusinessObjects Application Foundation to build a customized dashboard to monitor merchandise and inventory levels, including seasonal flow. An early alert system will work to target items that are selling faster than expected and give managers the ability to take action sooner than before.
MasterCard International: MasterCard International uses BusinessObjects to delve into its 55 terabyte data warehouse of payment-card transaction data. Packed with information that is valuable to the 25,000 banks and other financial-services companies that are involved with the issuance or acceptance of MasterCard payment cards, MasterCard uses Webintelligence®, from Business Objects to give these business partners access to the information in a secure, anonymous, and aggregated format. For example, using the WebIntelligence extranet, member banks can analyze operational data to see how quickly they are authorizing charges and how much fraud they are experiencing. MasterCard offers its customer an application called Business Performance Intelligence, which gives customers a single view of all operation performance statistics to better streamline their business systems and improve profitability. MasterCard International also recently purchased BusinessObjects Application Foundation, to build an executive dashboard that will allow MasterCard executives to track key performance indicators across their diverse lines of business.
CIO Leadership Award - Toshiba Corporation
Seijiro Suzuki, CIO of Toshiba Corporation, is the recipient of this year’s Business Objects CIO Leadership Award. Suzuki oversees a Business Objects deployment that encompasses tens of thousands of users around the world. Toshiba, a world leader in electronics, successfully implemented Global-ONE, a new management system that connects Toshiba’s semiconductor business headquarters to its production and delivery bases through the world. The nerve center of the system is Business Objects, which is used to access, analyze, and share real-time information to improve production and customer satisfaction. Great.
This year marks the 5th annual Business Objects Customer Excellence Awards, a program created to recognize successful and innovative Business Objects customers. Last year’s winners were American Red Cross, PepsiCo Inc., Pfizer Inc, the Principal Financial Group, and Sumitomo Corporation.
About Business Objects
Business Objects is the world's leading business intelligence (BI) software company. With more than 35,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500, Business Objects helps organizations gain better insight into their business, improve decision making, and optimize enterprise performance. The company's business intelligence platform, BusinessObjects™ XI, offers the BI industry's most complete and trusted platform for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and data integration. BusinessObjects XI includes Crystal Reports®, the industry standard for enterprise reporting. Business Objects has built the industry's strongest and most diverse partner community, and also offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively deploy their business intelligence projects.
Business Objects has dual headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, France. The company's stock is traded on both the Nasdaq (BOBJ) and Euronext Paris (ISIN: FR0004026250 - BOB) stock exchanges. More information about Business Objects can be found at www.businessobjects.com.
