Mid-Market Companies Embrace Multiuse Business Intelligence From Information Builders

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - May 8, 2008) - Information Builders, the independent leader in pervasive business intelligence (BI) systems, today announced that mid-market leaders have become a significant sector for its WebFOCUS BI solutions. Mid-market companies have unique characteristics that are often overlooked by functional enterprise software vendors. Despite their size and financial constraints, these organizations have all the same business processes as global enterprises and are focused on staying competitive.

"Our customers want to use WebFOCUS in every department so we have adapted our solutions to better meet their needs," says Information Builders CEO Gerald Cohen. "They strongly object to having to pay for it on a per-seat basis because it restricts their flexibility in deployment, so we have special licensing for our mid-market customers to remove this obstacle."

Together with other special mid-market policies, Information Builders is answering the call from customers like Garden Ridge, Hunt Petroleum, J&J Industries, Plexus, Utz, and YKK Canada, by providing a flexible BI system that they can use everywhere in their organization, across supply chain, finance, sales, and other areas. By incorporating the functionality required by just about every type of user and the versatility for every type of application, their return on investment in Information Builders is significant.

"We believe that competitive advantage is based increasingly on innovation, speed to market, and depth of knowledge, rather than simply the size of your organization," said Ed Smith, CIO of Utz. "By implementing WebFOCUS and giving all our users the ability to analyze data in real time, we're empowering them to make better decisions that contribute to our bottom line. When you're competing with big market players, it's all about how you leverage your information assets to stay ahead of the curve."

Recent Information Builders mid-market successes include:

-- Hunt Petroleum - an international oil and gas exploration and production company, Hunt Petroleum leverages WebFOCUS for insight into financial, production, reserve, and project-planning data that is stored in multiple, disparate database systems. WebFOCUS offers a sophisticated, definitive solution for integrated reporting with historical production data as well as financial information. With real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, WebFOCUS instantly lets field employees know which wells are experiencing problems, and therefore assists them in prioritizing the ones that need maintenance.

-- J&J Industries - one of the largest privately held commercial carpet manufacturers, J&J Industries uses WebFOCUS to efficiently measure productivity and monitor production, resulting in better decision-making and greater accountability. All departments, including inventory, claims, operations, special projects, finance, as well as all manufacturing areas benefit from WebFOCUS. If any department is unable to meet a production level, WebFOCUS quickly makes it apparent through an alert system so that users can promptly research and remedy the situation. With a BI standard that allows key performance indicators (KPIs) to be placed on dashboards of hundreds of workstations, J&J employees make better and faster decisions on a daily basis.

-- Plexus Medical Group - a leading healthcare consulting firm, Plexus uses WebFOCUS as a the platform for a nationwide system that delivers information about costs, reimbursements, treatment success rates, and many other key performance indicators. The BI solution, called Pi, helps providers analyze the quality and efficiency of their primary processes, then compares these results to national benchmarks. Hospitals using Pi may have cost reductions of up to 10 percent of their annual budgets, thanks to insight derived from the system.

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 Stephanie Fallon Emerge PR (617) 729-3176