OIL & GAS

Business Objects, the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that the business intelligence system it helped an international, Fortune 100 telecommunications firm implement has been chosen as a finalist for an award for excellence in business intelligence by the Billing World 2003 Conference, an annual telecommunications trade show organized by Billing World & OSS Today magazine. The Billing World Excellence Awards, selected by the editors of Billing World & OSS Today magazine with input from noted industry analysts, recognize the most significant achievements and innovation in telecommunications from the past year across eight categories. Business Objects and its customer were nominated in the "Best Business Intelligence Implementation" category. Billing World & OSS Today magazine (http://www.billingworld.com) is published 11 times a year and is the most widely read magazine by the back-office software decision makers in the telecommunications industry. "We applaud the editors of Billing World & OSS Today for their choice of this truly significant Business Objects deployment as a finalist for their award in business intelligence excellence," said Dave Kellogg, senior group vice president of worldwide marketing at Business Objects. "It is the forward-looking management of our customers that is driving better business and creating best practices that are setting the pace for the rest of the telecommunications industry." The telecommunications customer profiled in the Business Objects award submission employed an enterprise performance management system based on BusinessObjects(TM) Application Foundation, a complete framework for the rapid development and deployment of powerful analytic applications and management dashboards, and WebIntelligence(R), the web-based query, reporting, and analysis solution from Business Objects. With the help of Business Objects professional services consultants, this customer was able to easily develop and implement a Web-based system for collecting financial and non-financial information from multiple sources -- performing gap and benchmarking analyses on operating indicators, and presenting results to end users located in their corporate headquarters in the U.S. and across their 19 worldwide operating entities. The management benchmarking project began in February 2001, was implemented from October 2001 to March 2002, and is still in use today. The system's 200 global users include top management in every unit. Through the implementation of Business Objects software, the customer has been able to improve the quality and consistency of reported key operating indicators. Specifically, the solution provides a single easy-to-access dashboard to view and analyze key metrics, and to facilitate collaboration to identify opportunities to improve operational performance. The awards ceremony recognizing both finalists and winners will kick off the Billing World 2003 conference on Monday, June 23 at 6:30 p.m. at the Roney Palace Resort in Miami Beach, Florida. Additional information on the Billing World 2003 Conference can be found at: http://www.telestrategies.com.