PHYSICS

Information Builders, the leader in enterprise business intelligence (BI) and real-time Web reporting, today unveiled results of a benchmark study jointly conducted with Unisys Corporation, a worldwide information technology services and solutions company, as well as an independent product review conducted by Dr. Howard A. Kanter, CPA and associate director of DePaul University's Laboratory for Software Metrics. Both third-party studies found that Information Builders' WebFOCUS results surpassed other benchmark studies conducted for enterprise business intelligence and reporting scalability. Furthermore, Information Builders displays its commitment to BI scalability by offering the Enterprise Scalability Performance Benchmark Challenge. According to Howard Dresner, Vice President and Gartner Fellow, "User scalability of business intelligence tools and solutions has become paramount." (April 14, 2004, Note Number: T-22-6234) Competitive markets, heightened regulation, the need for information transparency, and more demanding shareholders, suppliers, customers, and employees are all forces creating demand for scalable enterprise reporting capabilities. Unisys Benchmarking The results of the benchmarking set a new bar for enterprise business intelligence and reporting scalability, outstripping all previously published benchmarks. The test reveals that WebFOCUS running on a Unisys ES7000 server is the premier solution on the market today for companies that need to deploy business intelligence applications to hundreds of thousands of users without compromising performance or availability. The testing was repeated numerous times with little variation in results, which demonstrates the high level of reliability of the WebFOCUS/ES7000 solution, making it ideally suited for 24x7 mission-critical applications. This repeatability of results, combined with the resilience of the WebFOCUS product architecture, means that enterprises will achieve similar scalability results for production business intelligence applications, regardless of their underlying data, application, or operating platforms. Dr. Howard Kanter Review Dr. Howard A. Kanter performed an independent review of Unisys and WebFOCUS scalability for DePaul University's Laboratory for Software Metrics. Dr. Kanter examined the validity and reliability of tests performed by a joint Unisys/Information Builders team. Procedures included a review of the methodology and test construction and independent testing of the original benchmarks using criteria selected and introduced by the independent reviewer. Results of this review indicate that the procedures followed and results obtained were reasonable and consistent with procedures usually followed in preparing such benchmark tests. Dr. Kanter also investigated results of the total cost of ownership study performed by Ventana Research in 2003. The methodologies employed were reviewed for reasonability. An interview was also held with the Ventana Research executive responsible for the TCO study. Based on both, Dr. Kanter has determined that the TCO research study provides reasonable support for Ventana's claim that Information Builders is the most cost-effective option for two categories of BI reporting - offering as much as $1.7 million in savings over competitors. Customer Implementations Demand Scalability Organizations realize that once information becomes available, demand for it increases exponentially within an enterprise. Not only does usage proliferation across departments, divisions, and geographic locations occur, but demand for new types of uses expands with requests for more data, different data, different views of data, and increased ability to manipulate and analyze that data. Information Builders customers lead the market in large-scale enterprise BI implementations and some of the world's most prestigious companies selected WebFOCUS based on its ability to grow with their business. * More than 48,000 dealership employees at Ford Motor Company use WebFOCUS to access a huge database to pull out the records, report the complex statistical calculations, and draw the graphs with their drill-down links - all within 60 to 90 seconds. * Moneris Solutions, Canada's leading credit-card technology merchant-processing company, serves over 25,000 credit-card clients, with 1,000 merchants being added every month, using WebFOCUS. Because of the way in which WebFOCUS minimizes network utilization, performance is exceptional and stress testing for common reports yielded an average response time of less than 10 seconds. * A major U.S. bank currently has 300,000 WebFOCUS users and is ramping up to 2 million. * RBC Royal Bank, a leading North American financial services organization, has more than 10,000 users and generates 900,000 reports per month. * New York City's Department of Health restaurant health violations site serves 40,000 hits per hour. "The results of these independent tests prove that WebFOCUS provides the best foundation for large-scale BI deployment at the lowest total cost of ownership," said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. "Our customers offer further proof that we are dedicated to providing the most scalable and functional solutions on the market today." Enterprise Scalability Performance Benchmark Challenge Other BI vendors claim to be the most scalable solution on the market. Information Builders offers proof to support its claim. Organizations that face scalability challenges are encouraged to visit Information Builders website, and register for the challenge. If qualified, Information Builders will give a free WebFOCUS scalability benchmarking either at their site or at Information Builders' test center to prove that our solution is the only one that can scale to meet the demands of your users. The complete results from the Unisys testing, Dr. Kanter's study, customer implementations, the Vantana TCO study, and information on the Enterprise Scalability benchmarking can be found at: www.informationbuilders.com/scalability.