Information Builders Announces WebFOCUS Controls for BEA WebLogic Workshop

Controls Can Allow BEA Developers to Incorporate Powerful WebFOCUS Functionality Into Applications

NEW YORK, May 25 -- Information Builders, the leader in enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions and real-time Web reporting, today announced the availability of WebFOCUS controls for BEA WebLogic Workshop(TM) 8.1 from BEA Systems . These controls can provide a simple and consistent mechanism for leveraging powerful WebFOCUS reporting functionality directly from the BEA WebLogic Workshop development environment. This is designed to enable BEA developers to easily leverage WebFOCUS components -- such as reporting, query and analysis, data visualization, and analytical dashboard functionality -- to help create powerful, scalable enterprise business intelligence and reporting applications across the BEA WebLogic Platform.

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"Through the WebFOCUS controls, powerful functionality can be seamlessly integrated within the BEA development environment helping to create business intelligence and reporting systems," said Kevin Quinn, vice president of Product Marketing for Information Builders. "This new capability can help enable BEA developers to rapidly deploy real-time business intelligence applications that are designed to scale to meet enterprise demand regardless of architecture."

After installation, the WebFOCUS controls can be displayed on the BEA WebLogic Workshop control palette, thereby allowing developers to choose from a list of WebFOCUS components and drag and drop the appropriate controls for use in the BEA WebLogic Platform application. Developers can utilize the controls to incorporate dynamic WebFOCUS content to their applications. The connection between the application developed and the underlying WebFOCUS infrastructure is via either a WebFOCUS API or a Web service. The WebFOCUS controls also are designed to help developers build service-oriented applications, where the WebFOCUS output is a service that is designed to be utilized when building these applications. The WebFOCUS controls are designed to provide a convenient design-time interface for that service.

The large BEA developer community can leverage WebFOCUS components such as:

   -- Interactive report pages that are designed to provide flexible
      capabilities, which empower end users at any skill levels to run
      reports in real time
   -- Multiple proactive report drill-down options are designed to be
      utilized -- including automatic and conditional -- with other reports,
      programs, or locations, as well as multiple locations within
      enterprise reports
   -- Flexible report output options designed to allow views of information
      in the format that best suits development needs, including XML, Excel,
      Excel Pivottables, PDF documents, and HTML files
   -- Ad hoc-report creation capabilities are designed to allow simple
      tabular reports or OLAP-enabled reports for advanced analytical
      functionality with automatic drill-down, -up, -across, and -through
      capabilities, and one-click resorting on measures; WebFOCUS can help
      enable filtering on all data categories

"With Information Builders joining the Workshop Controls and Extensibility Program, BEA developers can now be in a position to choose from a menu of WebFOCUS functionality to integrate into their applications," said Erik Frieberg, senior director of product marketing for BEA Systems. "The ability to call WebFOCUS functionality into the BEA WebLogic Workshop is designed to help reduce the time-to-deployment for next-generation Web information applications."

About Information Builders

Information Builders, a $300 million company, is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product -- the industry's most 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 29 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.

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