Business Objects and Ingram Micro Win TDWI Best Practices Award
San Jose, Calif. - June 4, 2001. Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJ), the world's leading provider of e-business intelligence (e-BI) solutions, today announced that The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) has named Business Objects and its customer, Ingram Micro Inc. (NYSE:IM), as winners of the 2001 Best Practices in Data Warehousing Award. Ingram Micro won the award in the "Distribution Industry" division, for the company's Web Insight Platform (WIP), which allows sales, marketing and management to obtain an integrated daily view of its customer and website activity.
The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) is the premier provider of in-depth, high quality education and training in the data warehousing and business intelligence industry. The competition provides thousands of practitioners with best practices they can follow as data warehousing and business intelligence continues to grow and expand.
A panel of experts, including practitioners, consultants, industry analysts, journalists, and Journal of Data Warehousing editors, judged nominations. The winners clearly demonstrated that their data warehouse and business intelligence projects were truly innovative solutions to problems commonly faced by data warehousing practitioners and were practices that could be followed by others. The judges examined four key criteria to determine the winners in each category: impact, relevance, innovation, and alignment.
Business Objects is recognized by TDWI for an integrated application at Ingram Micro, the largest global wholesale provider of technology products and services. The company's Web Insight Platform (WIP) allows sales, marketing and management to obtain an integrated daily view of its customer and Web site activity. WIP combines clickstream, sales, customer feedback and infrastructure data into one easy-to-access Internet solution. With this information, Ingram Micro can respond with agility to fine-tune its Web site and service operations, resulting in strengthened and more effective customer relationships.
"The recognition of Ingram Micro in the retail distribution category is another example of the importance of an e-business initiative in every type of business to cement customer relationships," said Bernard Liautaud, president and CEO of Business Objects. "Ingram Micro truly takes a 360 degree view of their customers by taking data from all elements of their business and allowing their executives an integrated view, so they can take action immediately and make the business thrive. We are thrilled to be recognized, along with Ingram Micro, by The Data Warehouse Institute, for our part in Ingram Micro's success."
"The WIP project was launched in early 2000 to help us better design and integrate processes for our web sites," said Guy Abramo, executive vice president and chief strategy and information office, Ingram Micro Inc. "Our goal was to pull together as many different data sources as available and to provide an integrated and complete view of our customers, what they want, and how well our web sites and services are meeting their needs. We are pleased that TDWI has recognized this project."
The Best Practices Award winners will present their winning nominations, and compete for the coveted Leadership Award in Data Warehousing, at TDWI's Best Practices Summit in Anaheim, CA, Aug. 14-15. On those dates, the winning nominations will be presented, then judged, by a panel of experts. The Leadership Award Winner will present its winning nomination at TDWI's Leadership Conference, November 4-9, 2001 in Orlando, Florida.
About Ingram Micro Inc.
Ingram Micro Inc. is the largest global wholesale provider of technology solutions, products and services. The company operates in 36 countries with sales of $30.7 billion for the fiscal year 2000. Ingram Micro's global regions provide the distribution of technology products and services, marketing development and supply chain management services to more than 175,000 technology solution providers and 1,700 manufacturers. The company is focused on maximizing shareowner value and achieving customer satisfaction through innovation in the information technology supply chain. Visit www.ingrammicro.com/corp.
About Business Objects
Business Objects is the world's leading business intelligence (BI) software company. With more than 35,000 customers worldwide, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 500, Business Objects helps organizations gain better insight into their business, improve decision making, and optimize enterprise performance. The company's business intelligence platform, BusinessObjects™ XI, offers the BI industry's most complete and trusted platform for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and data integration. BusinessObjects XI includes Crystal Reports®, the industry standard for enterprise reporting. Business Objects has built the industry's strongest and most diverse partner community, and also offers consulting and education services to help customers effectively deploy their business intelligence projects.
Business Objects has dual headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, France. The company's stock is traded on both the Nasdaq (BOBJ) and Euronext Paris (ISIN: FR0004026250 - BOB) stock exchanges. More information about Business Objects can be found at www.businessobjects.com.
