ECONOMICS

Astea International Inc., a leading provider of Service Smart, Enterprise Proven service management solutions, today announced it has completed integration of its Astea Alliance product suite with reporting and analysis products from Business Objects. This integration provides Astea customers with the ability to leverage the information stored within their service management system for improved organizational efficiency and enhanced visibility into customer and product trends. "Our integration with Business Objects allows our customers to improve visibility into very valuable data already sitting in their service management system," said Greg Cicio, vice president of business development at Astea. "They can now generate reports and analytics around critical service management trends such as first-time fix rates; inventory stock movement of spare parts; individual technician performance; and most importantly, visibility into profitable versus non-profitable customers. These are just a few examples of how service organizations can make more informed decisions to directly improve operational costs that affect the bottom line." The integration has been completed with BusinessObjects(TM) InfoView, a business intelligence portal used to create a gateway into multiple data sources, and WebIntelligence(R), a web-based query and analysis product from Business Objects. The existing OEM alliance agreement allows Astea to license these Business Objects solutions to its customers. The Astea Alliance suite now ships with more than 200 pre-designed Business Objects reports for common service management needs. With more than 1,400 Business Objects seats sold since initial integration was completed in September of 2003, Astea now plans to integrate with BusinessObjects(TM) Customer Intelligence, a packaged analytic application that helps companies improves sales and marketing performance. This integration will provide even more thorough analysis of service management system information to customers. "Service organizations have very complex information needs, often making business intelligence a mission critical application for these companies," said Wyatt Mullin, director of worldwide OEM for Business Objects. "The combination of reporting and analytics from Business Objects, with service management software from Astea, delivers quality information throughout an organization. Using the integrated solution, companies can more easily track, understand, and manage their business to improve the services they offer customers."