CIO Magazine Honors Information Builders Customer With CIO 100 Award

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - June 5, 2008) - Information Builders, the independent leader in pervasive business intelligence (BI) systems, today announced that its customer, The Hillman Group, is a winner of CIO magazine's 2008 CIO 100 Award. A supplier of hardware items as well as manufacturer and distributor of key duplication and engraving systems, Hillman won for its innovative use of Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform. The annual award program recognizes organizations around the world that exemplify the highest level of operational and strategic excellence in information technology (IT).

"We're honored to be acknowledged for the work we've done with Information Builders," said Jim Honerkamp, vice president and CIO of IT, The Hillman Group. "We see this as just the beginning of tapping into the potential for us to achieve significant business benefits with BI. Next we'll be looking to integrate predictive models."

"The CIO 100 honors organizations that have used technology in innovative ways to generate value to the business," said Abbie Lundberg, editor in chief of CIO magazine. "Unlike other top lists, it's not just about who's biggest -- it's about who's doing the most interesting and relevant things."

Hillman's award-winning submission for the CIO 100 focused on the company's customized WebFOCUS application that has improved decision-making based on real-time data, empowered business users, and helped managers to better identify and address problems. Its operational BI solution is a virtual data warehouse with an integrated view of operational and financial data. More than 800 users, including 500 remote employees, access WebFOCUS reports via their browser and can easily conduct queries, change formats, drill down, and export data.

The key is that all the necessary functionality is embedded into the reports; no WebFOCUS software has to be installed on the user's computer to access and manipulate a report. Hillman also implemented a geographic information system-based BI application that displays its 12 distribution centers, overlaid with UPS zone maps, and includes upcoming product shipment data. Hillman's overall approach made the BI functionality "self-service." As a result, the company realized hard-dollar returns by being able to disprove vendor fines when accused of sending an incomplete order. During a two-month period, Hillman used the BI fill-rate reporting system to analyze instances to prove that it had not short-shipped -- saving $131,000 in fines.

"Hillman has embraced what our technology is all about, innovating to solve business problems," says Information Builders CEO and founder Gerald Cohen. "We believe the business value they've gained from optimizing the functionality in WebFOCUS is impressive. It's nice to see that they are now being recognized for their enterprise excellence by the esteemed editorial team at CIO."

The 2008 CIO 100 Awards will be presented at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on August 26 at the conclusion of the tenth annual CIO 100 Symposium® and Awards Ceremony.

About The Hillman Group

Based in Cincinnati, OH, The Hillman Group sells to hardware stores, home centers, pet suppliers, mass merchants, and other retail outlets principally in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and South America. Their product line includes thousands of small parts such as fasteners and related hardware items, keys, key duplication systems, and identification items, such as tags, letters, numbers and signs. Hillman provides services including design and installation of merchandizing systems and maintenance of appropriate in-store inventory levels. http://www.hillmangroup.com.

About Information Builders

As a leading independent business intelligence (BI) company, Information Builders has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. The company's flagship WebFOCUS product is the world's most widely used business intelligence platform. Superior architecture and intuitive nature enables WebFOCUS to address the needs of everyone in the extended enterprise -- executive, analytical, operational, and beyond -- and provides the agility to adapt to changing business conditions. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of the global organization and can support dozens to millions of users.

One of the company's greatest differentiators is the integration expertise it brings to the business intelligence market. Information Builders iWay Software suite solves complex integration problems with pre-built components that require minimal custom programming, together with a flexible enterprise architecture that can adapt to long-term change. The award-winning combination of WebFOCUS and iWay give Information Builders customers the ability to live up to the company motto: "Because Everyone Makes Decisions."

Customer service is at the core of every decision Information Builders makes. The company's Professional Services division specializes in building custom tailored applications using WebFOCUS and iWay Software. The company continues to successfully provide quality software and superior services to its customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and numerous U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners. For more information visit http://www.informationbuilders.com.

Contact Information: Press Contacts: Kathleen Moran Information Builders (212) 736-4433 Karyn Martin Emerge PR (617) 729-3173