Business Objects Ships BusinessMiner

First Data Mining Tool Aimed at -- and Accessible to -- the Mainstream Business User

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San Jose, Calif. -Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJY), the world's leading provider of integrated query, reporting, and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools, today announced that it has begun shipping BusinessMiner, the first data mining tool aimed at -- and accessible to -- the mainstream business user.

BusinessMiner is a powerful desktop data mining tool that helps non-technical business users automatically find previously undetected relationships in their business data.

"With BusinessMiner, Business Objects is continuing to expand the range of functionality that they offer to their users," said Herb Edelstein, president of Two Crows Corporation, a leading data mining consulting firm. "As one of the leaders in end user query and reporting, Business Objects has been carrying out a systematic expansion of its target market- first into OLAP with BusinessObjects 4.0 and now into data mining with BusinessMiner. Business Objects clearly has a vision of this market, and a plan for executing it."

"Our clients in a variety of industries -- insurance, telecom, healthcare, and financial -- are seeing the need for extended analysis capabilities such as data mining," said Steve Miller, Senior Director, Braun Technology Group. "BusinessMiner offers the mainstream business user an easy to use, solid, scaleable solution that is fully integrated with BusinessObjects 4.0. BusinessMiner will play a major role in our consulting practice."

Based on intuitive decision tree technology, BusinessMiner provides easy-to-understand hierarchies that graphically depict relationships in data. With its easy-to-use interface, anyone who understands percents and flowcharts can easily understand the information that BusinessMiner tells them about their data. BusinessMiner provides this ease of use without sacrifices in functionality - the product provides all classical data mining functions including modeling, discovery, visualization, what-if, and segmentation.

"We are very proud to be the first decision support company to ship a desktop data mining tool," said Dave Kellogg, vice president of corporate marketing at Business Objects. "With BusinessObjects 4.0 we delivered integrated query, reporting, and analysis to our customers. Now with BusinessMiner, users can go further into their analysis to find hidden relationships in their data - and at a fraction of the cost of high-end data mining solutions."


Pricing and Availability

Priced at $495 when purchased with BusinessObjects, and at $995 when purchased as standalone, BusinessMiner is the first data mining solution to break the $500 price point. BusinessMiner is available now on Windows 95 and Windows NT. BusinessMiner has been developed with Alice technology from ISoft SA.