NEW YORK and ORLANDO, Fla., April 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today announced a powerful solution to meet the burgeoning demand for process-driven BI. As business operations become increasingly more complex in the global environment, enterprises require intelligent, end-to-end processes that can not only monitor business activities, but provide actionable results. By combining the power of the WebFOCUS business intelligence platform with iWay SOA Middleware, organizations can now effectively address efficiency at the business-process level, reducing costly errors while improving overall agility, responsiveness, and profitability.

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According to a recent Gartner report on process-driven business intelligence, "to enable process-driven business intelligence, IT organizations must bolster their BI platform across a balanced set of new capabilities, including information dissemination, development, and integration and analysis." (1)

Process-driven BI from Information Builders leverages the service-oriented architecture of iWay SOA Middleware as the foundation for creating reusable, integrated, and intelligent business processes for maximum responsiveness and agility. Using iWay's highly scalable enterprise service bus (ESB), with a fully integrated service design-time workbench and Web services creation and deployment capabilities, organizations can deploy the BI aspects as services that may be treated independently, eliminating the need to rip, replace, or rewrite entire applications.

For most organizations, business interactions focus around an event such as an order arriving. This event can trigger a series of responses and decisions. For example, based on WebFOCUS analytics embedded in the process, the physical size of the order can be determined. If it is too big for the warehouse space available, WebFOCUS analytics are capable of triggering a change in the process that ships the order to a different warehouse that has the required space, then alerts warehouse employees that a larger than expected order will be arriving. Process-driven BI enables intelligent decision-making to be embedded within business processes, based on a variety of conditions, and determine how the process flow should be executed for more effective results.

Process-driven BI capabilities also include: * Alerts - providing users with notification when analytics produce certain results, allowing users to resolve issues as they unfold in real time * Analytics - embedding analysis in order to inform users or determine how to automatically manage the process workflow based on results * Data visualization - enabling users to view the process at multiple points throughout the event and decide how data is produced, delivered, and designed * Reporting - aligning BI with decision-making more tightly than ever before, enabling users to determine the precise events or conditions that trigger the need for a report

"Business intelligence is not just about turning data into information, rather organizations need that data to impact how their business operates and responds to the changing marketplace," said Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "Information Builders is the only BI software vendor that can deliver process-driven business intelligence solutions today. Our unique pairing of BI and enterprise integration technology offers customers a powerful, cost-effective solution for creating and deploying smarter business processes that take business intelligence to a whole new level."

About Information Builders

Information Builders is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time operational reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product - the industry's most scalable, secure, and flexible - is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS' empowerment of organizations seeking to leverage all their data - by accessing it all from legacy to data warehouse - is unmatched.

Information Builders' award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services for over 31 years to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,750 people and has over 350 business partners. For more information, visit http://www.informationbuilders.com/.

(1) Gartner. "Deliver Process-Driven Business Intelligence With a Balanced

BI Platform." By Kurt Schlegal. April 12, 2006.

CONTACT: Kathleen Moran of Information Builders, +1-917-339-6313,
kathleen_moran@ibi.com; or Julie Crotty of Horn Group, Inc., +1-781-356-7148,
jcrotty@horngroup.com

Web site: http://www.informationbuilders.com/