Information Builders Customers Embrace Active Reports Technology

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - March 11, 2009) - Information Builders, the independent leader in operational business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that leading organizations around the globe are rapidly adopting WebFOCUS Active Reports for portable sorting, filtering, and analysis to better understand customer needs in real time, greatly improve decision-making, and operate more cost effectively. As the industry's first portable BI platform for delivering interactive analytic applications, WebFOCUS Active Reports has its own API, components, security, and analytic engine, enabling users to create active dashboards and receive Active Reports on mobile devices.

"Many vendors' dashboards are only available to select users instead of being distributed to all employees with operational responsibilities," said Gerald Cohen, CEO and founder of Information Builders. "Our active technology empowers everyone within the organization to give businesses the competitive edge and increased business productivity needed to thrive in today's economy."

Customer benefits of WebFOCUS Active Reports include:

-- Improved user experience and decision-making - Multiple reports are consolidated into a single interactive view making viewing data and performing analysis easier

-- Guaranteed single version of the truth - Users can receive scheduled updates to the dashboard, ensuring that they always have the latest information in their e-mail folders

-- Scales to unlimited numbers of users - All interactions are self-contained and occur in the browser, meaning a virtually unlimited number of concurrent users can analyze data

-- Requires no specialized software and no connection - Data and interactive capabilities are bound together in a single file that can be managed without installing additional software; users without a network connection can access reports from anywhere

Dealer Services Manages Dealer Risk and Increases Profitability

Dealer Services Corporation (DSC), a national inventory financing company for used car and power sports dealers, relies on WebFOCUS as its enterprise BI standard to provide more than 450 of the rapidly growing organization's non-technical business users with self-service access to the information they need, when they need it, to accurately manage dealer risk and make better decisions. DSC currently uses three types of Active Report dashboards: departmental (currently five in use), one company dashboard (used company-wide), and one executive dashboard slanted toward more financial data.

New dealers enter the market and existing dealers exit the market on a regular basis. With a WebFOCUS Active Report on dealer risk, DSC can track and monitor the situations that usually occur before a dealer gets into trouble. This helps the dealer avoid default and minimizes the consequences for DSC should the situation deteriorate. DSC can also run Active Reports on loan activities to view the different risks involved with certain loans. The reports can identify anomalies or evidence of risky behavior, such as inconsistent loan repayment patterns. Active Reports allow them to take into consideration a wide number of factors that they may have previously dismissed and help reduce the amount of human error in the loan decision process.

Israeli Credit Insurance Company Gains Offline Analysis - With Zero Overhead

As the leading credit insurer in Israel, Israeli Credit Insurance Company (ICIC) protects more than $11 billion worth of credit each year in both local and foreign trade transactions. ICIC needed to quickly build a versatile reporting environment to help policyholders identify, analyze, and reduce risk via secure, controlled access to their policy information. ICIC used Information Builders WebFOCUS software because of its comprehensive application development and deployment capabilities including Active Reports and Active Dashboards. Powered by highly portable JavaScript technology, Active Reports can be downloaded and viewed within a browser, either online or offline, meaning ICIC customers did not need licensed BI software to view and analyze information. The reporting application also features automatic exports to Excel spreadsheets and interactive graphs that let users visualize the exposure data.

The ICIC online reporting system has been in production for about a year and it already has 600 registered users. ICIC customers are particularly intrigued by WebFOCUS Active Reports since it enables them to slice and dice the insurance data without having to be connected to ICIC's information systems. In the future, developers plan to use WebFOCUS Active Dashboards to make it faster and easier to present information. This will enable customers to compile multiple tables and charts into a single customized dashboard.

"WebFOCUS gives us a competitive edge by making it easier for customers to create and manage their exposures," said Ofer Resh, chief information officer, ICIC. "We regard BI software as one of our primary market differentiators."

In an industry where information is the primary currency, WebFOCUS Active Reports let policyholders more thoroughly track and manage their exposures, saving time for internal developers and providing a unique set of services that gives ICIC a competitive edge.

About Information Builders

Information Builders' award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world's most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders' iWay Software suite provides state-of-the-art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data, and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Together, these products give Information Builders' customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.

Information Builders' customers include most of the Fortune 100 and 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. More information is available at informationbuilders.com.

Contact Information: Press Contacts: Kathleen Moran Information Builders (917) 339-6313 Karyn Martin Emerge PR (617) 729-3173