Oil and Energy Companies Receive Business Intelligence Power Surge With Information Builders

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - October 3, 2007) - Information Builders, the leader in production business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced numerous organizations in the oil and energy sector are utilizing WebFOCUS as their business intelligence standard. Valero Energy, the largest refiner in North America; Hunt Petroleum, an international oil and gas exploration and production company; and Petro-Canada, one of the largest integrated oil and gas companies in Canada have all selected Information Builders WebFOCUS for business intelligence. These organizations join dozens of existing oil and energy companies that use WebFOCUS to ensure delivery of critical business information across the enterprise and optimize profitability amid unpredictable shifts in costs and margins.

"The very competitive oil and energy market recognizes that with pricing and supply continuously fluctuating in this space, access to more timely and detailed data enables deeper insight into opportunities, faster response to market changes, and more informed decision-making," said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "Hunt Petroleum, as an example, has seen crucial time-savings and an overall boost to productivity with WebFOCUS. In order to reduce inefficiencies and inaccuracies across departments, Hunt was able to easily integrate existing financial, production, reserves, and project-planning data stored in multiple, disparate database systems, within WebFOCUS reports."

Valero Energy Supplies Clean Barrels and Clean Data

With 21,000 employees and more than $90 billion in revenue, Valero Energy is the largest refiner in North America and has a throughput capacity of approximately 3.1 million barrels per day. Valero has long been recognized throughout the industry as a leader in the production of premium, environmentally clean products, and oxygenates.

WebFOCUS met six important technology requirements for Valero thereby avoiding any substantial customizations: Excel integration, ad hoc support, multi-source, OLAP, Web enablement, and integration with the SAP portal -- all of which provided Valero executives with the same or greater functionality than they had before consolidating on one BI tool. "WebFOCUS keeps our data timely and reliably consistent," says Kirk Hewitt, VP of reporting and financial systems, Valero Energy. "Standardizing on one business intelligence tool allows us to communicate about the same numbers, make good decisions, and accurately report comparisons to budgeted information. Managers now confidently scroll through daily financial reports instead of having to wait for dated monthly information."

Hunt Petroleum Powers Up Decision-Making With BI

Hunt Petroleum Corporation, an international oil and gas exploration and production company, chose WebFOCUS as its enterprise BI standard based on its real-time reporting functionality, effortless dashboard management and data integration capabilities. With a rich history dating back almost 80 years, Hunt Petroleum conducts drilling operations and labor-intensive searches for underground oil deposits that can often prove inconclusive, but WebFOCUS offers a sophisticated, definitive solution for monitoring and reporting on oil levels. As the company continued to grow in size, and with data stored in multiple database systems, it became critically important to bring in a BI solution that could pull data from all sources and integrate the results within BI reports.

"Generating our monthly AFE (authorization for expenditure) reports was a 16-hour, multi-day activity due to the need to pull data from so many different sources and then proceed with an Excel-based analysis," said Kevin Leaverton, chief information officer of Hunt Petroleum. "With WebFOCUS, it now takes us two minutes to access all the data and create this report, resulting in crucial time-savings, as well as boosting overall productivity."

Petro-Canada Fuels Reporting Capabilities

Petro-Canada, one of the largest integrated oil and gas companies in Canada, has selected WebFOCUS as its enterprise BI standard for reporting and information delivery. Before making the standardization decision, Petro-Canada conducted a comprehensive comparison of several leading BI vendors. In its ongoing efforts to improve the efficiency of its information technology, Petro-Canada was looking for a standard reporting tool that could be used across the corporation. Coincidentally, due to the growth and internationalization of its business, it was also looking for a reporting tool that could extract data from multiple systems to produce a consolidated corporate financial view.

Petro-Canada utilized WebFOCUS to develop their enterprise reporting system (ERS), a solution for consolidated financial reporting, and to provide for the analysis of financial and operating data for Petro-Canada's financial managers. ERS, having extracted data from multiple systems to produce a consolidated corporate financial view, is the primary source for gathering corporate financial and operational information and providing predefined and ad hoc reporting.

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 subsidiary iWay Software provides state-of-the-art, multi-purpose integration engines 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 live up to the company motto: Your business. No barriers.

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 1600 people and has more than 350 business partners. More information is available at www.informationbuilders.com.

Contact Information: Press Contacts: Kathleen Moran Information Builders (212) 736-4433 Jennifer Moebius Emerge PR (617) 729-3183