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Information Builders to Extend WebFOCUS to Provide Predictive Analysis
[June 03, 2008]

Information Builders to Extend WebFOCUS to Provide Predictive Analysis


(Marketwire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) NASHVILLE, TN, June 3 / MARKET WIRE/ --

Information Builders, the independent leader
in pervasive business intelligence (BI) systems,
today announced plans to deliver WebFOCUS RStat, the first BI platform to
enable data miners, statisticians, BI developers, and analysts to
collaboratively build predictive applications for field and operational
employees. By integrating a leading open source engine with WebFOCUS,
Information Builders will extend the value and accessibility of predictive
analytics in production BI applications across the enterprise.

Today's transactional systems capture and store large volumes of
multi-dimensional data. With hundreds of variables, the possibilities to
slice and dice can quickly become as overwhelming as an Excel report or
PivotTable with hundreds of columns and thousands of rows. Data mining and
statistics are more efficient methods to analyze such data sets because
analysts can quickly understand which of the many variables are important.
Furthermore, they can use the historical data to generate predictions about
the future for anything from credit risk and crime occurrence to insurance
and medical risks.

"Data mining has been largely excluded from mainstream BI applications,
managed as one-off projects where a specialist conducts the analysis and
reports the findings," says Information Builders CEO and founder Gerald
Cohen. "Very rarely has prediction become part of the daily operations of
field workers. Information Builders believes that every decision-maker at
any level in the organization can and should benefit from access to
predictive modeling applications. Embedding them within WebFOCUS allows us
to extend the use of these models to users on all platforms in many, many
different kinds of applications."

Expected at year end, WebFOCUS RStat is a statistical modeling workbench
embedded in Developer Studio that enables scoring of new data on every
platform and database, even in real time. RStat allows data miners and BI
developers to work collaboratively with the same tools to access,
manipulate, or transform data; develop predictive models; and create and
deploy Web applications along with associated reports to any worker within
their organization. By incorporating RStat, the widely used open source
statistical library product among the world's universities, Information
Builders dramatically reduces the customers' cost of integrating these
robust technologies.

Police officers, for example, planning without predictive tools rely on
intuition, but predictive models allow them to benchmark their intuition
and experience against past data in the system. They can verify their crime
expectations against predictions based on past crime data to gain a more
accurate view and deploy resources effectively. If a call center operator
answers a call and that customer's lifetime score is automatically
generated from a scoring application, the operator can tailor the
conversation accordingly. Similarly, an underwriter of specialty insurance
policies empowered with analytics can benchmark the cost of a policy
against the data and price a policy based on the most important variables
and the entire insurance history for such policies.

Each of these field workers benefits from modeling work done by
specialists. By enabling different tiers of specialists to work on the same
platform within a robust BI system, Information Builders gives customers
unified applications that use expert knowledge and have immediate relevance
and value in the field. An integrated environment like WebFOCUS RStat
eliminates the need to work in different and often incompatible
environments and eases the formation and effectiveness of BI competency
centers. The product can be deployed on any platform so any organization
can take advantage of Information Builders' entire data access and data
transformation capabilities to power statistical applications.

Highlights of WebFOCUS RStat will include:

-- Integrated, intuitive user interface in Developer Studio to access the
most widely used statistical and data mining models: decision trees, neural
networks, linear and logistic regressions, random forests, support vector
machine, boosting, association rules, K-means, and hierarchical clustering


-- Ability in Developer Studio for modelers to prepare the data, i.e.,
extract it from any data source, manipulate and transform fields to prepare
data for analysis, and do the modeling
-- Access to a simple Web form so that end users can, with the click of a
button, generate scores and predictions without having to know anything
about data mining and modeling
-- Predicted values and scores can be incorporated in any WebFOCUS report
so that users can benchmark their intuitions and expert opinions to ensure
that they have taken all factors into consideration when making decisions
-- RStat will be extensible via scripts and open source to leverage the
numerous packages developed by industry experts and scientists to perform
highly complex analyses and rapidly deploy applications


Plans to develop WebFOCUS RStat were unveiled today at Information Builders
annual Summit User Conference in Nashville.


About Information Builders

As a leading independent business intelligence (BI) company for the past 30
years, Information Builders has provided innovative solutions to more than
12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and numerous U.S.
federal government agencies. The company's flagship WebFOCUS product is the
world's most widely used BI platform. Superior architecture and intuitive
nature enables WebFOCUS to address the needs of everyone in the extended
global enterprise -- executive, analytical, operational, and beyond. It
provides the agility to adapt to changing business conditions with the
security, scalability, and flexibility to support dozens to millions of
users.

Unique to the company is the integration expertise it brings to the BI
market. Information Builders iWay Software suite solves complex integration
problems with pre-built components that require minimal custom programming.
The award-winning combination of WebFOCUS and iWay give Information
Builders customers the ability to embrace the company motto: "Because
Everyone Makes Decisions."

Information Builders is committed to customer service excellence with a
Professional Services division that specializes in building custom
applications using WebFOCUS and iWay Software. Headquartered in New York
City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has
more than 350 business partners. Visit http://www.informationbuilders.com.

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Press Contacts:
Kathleen Moran
Information Builders
(212) 736-4433Email Contact
Stephanie Fallon
Emerge PR
(617) 729-3176Email Contact

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