BUSINESS OBJECTS EXTENDS ENTERPRISE AND EXTRANET BI MARKET

Business Objects, one of the world's leading providers of e-business intelligence (e-BI) solutions, announced BusinessObjects Auditor 1.0, a new product created specifically to help customers tune their business intelligence (BI) deployments to better meet user needs.

BusinessObjects Auditor is a Web-based tool that gives customers insight into their Business Objects deployment and enables administrators to monitor, analyze, and optimize their BI solution.

In recent years, the growth in scale and maturity of e-BI solutions from workgroups to enterprise-wide deployments has placed new demands on information technology (IT) departments that must maintain and adjust solutions for upwards of thousands to tens of thousands of users. More recently with extranet deployments, system administrators are more distant from the end users and lack insight into they are using the e-BI extranet.

To meet the challenges of these types of deployments, Business Objects has developed BusinessObjects Auditor, an auditing tool built on existing Business Objects products to help optimize e-BI deployments. Business Objects is leading the e-BI industry in both enterprise and extranet deployments: at the end of 2000, Business Objects had 19 customers with more than 10,000 licenses, three customers with more than 20,000 licenses, and more than 400 extranet customers.

"Our unique position as the industry leader in both the enterprise and extranet BI markets has placed us in the perfect spot for taking the next step to helping our customers with their BI deployments," said Crispin Read, vice president of product marketing at Business Objects. "BusinessObjects Auditor is a direct result of working very closely with our customers to understand what they need to better deploy e-BI across the enterprise and beyond via an extranet."

BusinessObjects Auditor is built on the award-winning technology from Business Objects, giving customers a monitoring tool for the e-BI environment that takes advantage of the ease of use, security, scaleability, and extensibility of BusinessObjects 2000. BusinessObjects Auditor offers Business Objects customers a unique look into their e-BI deployment via key indicators and reports, giving information technology valuable insight on the use of the Business Objects system as well as advanced analysis capabilities that will help customers monitor, analyze, and optimize their e-BI solution.

Critical information insight on users, resources, and the e-BI system

With BusinessObjects Auditor, IT users are able to get a closer look at the Business Objects system using dashboards and predefined key indicators. These enable IT to monitor user activity and user access rights and view information on resources such as documents, categories, and universes, as well as data about the system such as server load and response time. The IT users can customize their indicators, for example, number of connected users, and can then monitor these indicators over time. This is critical as deployment size grows exponentially within an enterprise and IT needs more resources to monitor end user activity.

Monitoring the e-BI system is particularly critical in extranet deployments, where the end users accessing the data are external to the host company. Because the data users are located outside of the company, often at the organization's best business partners and customers, the level of service and performance of the data warehouse is that much more critical. Also, since users are located outside of the company walls, typically IT is not as familiar with user needs, configuration, and experience. With BusinessObjects Auditor, IT will be able to remotely monitor the extranet usage.

Analysis on user and system data to quickly spot trends and predict future changes

Using standard reports in BusinessObjects Auditor, IT users can see system information over daily, weekly, and monthly intervals. Auditor, provides more than 120 reports that will make it easy for IT users to analyze trends that can appear in the key indicators, for example, if a certain report has a huge spike of readers on a specific day of the week. With the ad hoc analysis users can slice, dice, and pivot on these reports to explore the system information in greater depth. Auditor allows you to do impact analysis -- to see the effects of possible changes to documents and universes before implementing them. For instance, an IT administrator may want to find all the documents that will be affected by planned modifications to the universes or find all users who will be affected by changes in some reports.

Take action to tune existing and future enterprise and extranet deployments

Based on the information and analysis from Auditor, IT administrators can better decide how to tune their e-BI solution for optimized use and performance. For example, by deleting or archiving unused reports and objects, IT is making the e-BI system much easier for users to navigate and is providing quicker access to the desired information. Auditor also enables administrators to tune the data warehouse to fit the real-world needs of the end users. For example by tracking the most frequent queries, database administrators can see and address the need for aggregate tables which in turn will speed up the refreshing of the most popular reports.

In an extranet environment, IT can use Auditor to gauge peak usage points and thus more easily determine when to increase server power in order to maintain agreed service levels. In addition, a company looking to turn their data warehouse into a profit center via an extranet deployment could use information from Auditor to see the most requested information and then generate new revenue opportunities by making additional billable reports available to extranet users. Using BusinessObjects Auditor a company can provide self-service access to the most desired information in an increasingly tailored solution, thus increasing customer service and customer loyalty.

"We've been wanting an audit trail on users for some time now. BusinessObjects Auditor is a great solution for seeing user activities, both on the internal deployment and on the extranet application," said Don Stoller, senior director of information management at Owens & Minor. "Being able to see what objects and reports are most frequently used will help us tune the BI deployment and offer more personalized customer service. While we currently invoice extranet customers on a monthly basis, we've been asked to bill on usage as an alternative; Auditor can help us track usage to provide the method and frequency of billing that some of our customers prefer."

Platforms and Availability

BusinessObjects Auditor runs on Windows NT and is generally available. Auditor can be used to monitor deployments on NT, Windows 2000, and UNIX.

About Business Objects

Business Objects is one of the world's leading providers of e-business intelligence (e-BI) solutions. The company coined the term e-business intelligence in 1998 to describe the intersection of business intelligence and the internet. Using e-business intelligence, organizations can access, analyze, and share information in intranet, extranet, and e-business environments. In intranets, the company's products provide employees with information to make better business decisions, and are used in environments ranging from workgroups of 20 users to enterprise deployments exceeding 20,000. In the extranet environment, the company is pioneering the use of e-BI in applications that allow organizations to build stronger relationships by linking customers, partners, and suppliers via the internet. In addition, the company's products can improve the performance of an e-business by providing reporting and analysis against the ever-expanding amount of transaction and profile data that is collected each day throughout the world wide Web.

Founded in 1990, Business Objects pioneered the modern business intelligence industry by inventing and patenting a "semantic layer" that insulates users from the technical complexity of database systems. Today, the company has over 12,400 customers in more than 80 countries. Business Objects can be reached at 408-953-6000 and www.businessobjects.com.

Contact Business Objects, Nikkol Nagle, 408-953-6079, nnagle@businessobjects.com.