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Business Objects Responds to Strong Customer Momentum With Compelling New Offerings for Midsize Companies


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Innovative Midmarket Solutions BusinessObjects™ Edge 3.0 and Crystal Reports® Server 2008 Deliver Insight and Decision-Quality Information to All Corners of the Organization

SAN JOSE, Calif. and PARIS - July 22, 2008 - Business Objects, an SAP company (NYSE: SAP) and the world’s leading provider of solutions that optimize business performance, today announced two solutions designed to address the decision-making needs of small and midsize companies. BusinessObjects™ Edge 3.0 is a significantly enhanced release in the proven suite of Edge Series midmarket business intelligence (BI) products and offers an open, end-to-end BI platform for midsize companies. Crystal Reports® Server 2008 is a vastly simplified and improved reporting platform release based on the industry’s de-facto standard in reporting, Crystal Reports. Both solutions underscore Business Objects’ commitment to serving small and midsize businesses by putting valuable, trustworthy information into the hands of decision makers across the organization.

Since 2005, Business Objects has been delivering BI solutions tailored specifically to the needs of this growing market segment. More than 6,000 customers around the world have embraced these solutions to help enhance their business performance. The BusinessObjects Edge Series delivers a complete range of query, analysis, reporting, data integration and dashboards, and is designed and priced for the business-user audience within growing organizations, giving them deeper insight into their performance and the ability to share this information with a wide variety of business stakeholders, as well as to partners, suppliers and customers. Crystal Reports Server has been specifically developed by Business Objects to help IT automate the process of delivering any type of information to any user effectively and simply. Both solutions are built on the same platform technology to allow for seamless migration as business requirements grow. In addition, both solutions provide connectivity and integration into SAP environments.

“Business Objects continues to add significant investment to enhance its business intelligence solutions for midsize companies such as ours,” said George Bock, vice president of IT at SoleTechnology, a leading action sports apparel and footwear company. “We are excited about the possibilities Edge Series 3.0 will bring to our organization to improve efficiency and performance, and are constantly impressed with Business Objects’ continued commitment to its customers in this space.”

Customer Adoption of BusinessObjects Edge Soars
Since its launch in 2007, BusinessObjects Edge Series has become a trusted BI solution for small and midsize companies around the world that want to optimize business performance. More than 800 organizations worldwide have already deployed the solution, with more signing on every month. The robust suite for midsize companies delivers affordable solutions that help make business users more effective and can address key BI requirements including flexible ad-hoc query reporting and analysis, dashboards and visualization, and powerful data quality and integration. To read more about the features in BusinessObjects Edge 3.0, please visit: www.businessobjects.com/product/catalog/edge.

“Customers in the midmarket continue to demand innovative, well-packaged and well-priced business intelligence solutions,” said Robert Anderson, research vice president, Gartner. “Companies who deliver compelling, easy to use, complete products to this important segment will be able to succeed by helping small and midsize companies realize faster ROI on their business intelligence deployments.”

Crystal Reports Server 2008 Simplifies Process for Sharing Insights
Relevant, trustworthy and visually compelling reports can often signal the difference between a persuasive argument and a mass of disjointed information. For more than 15 years, organizations have depended on Crystal Reports to create and present business information in richly formatted reports. With the release of Crystal Reports Server 2008, customers can take advantage of new features, including improvements to report creation, navigation and formatting from virtually any data source. Crystal Reports Server 2008 is a comprehensive report management solution, specifically developed and priced to enable report designers to create highly formatted business information and allow IT to deliver the information to any user within the organization, as well as to partners, suppliers and customers via the Web, email, corporate portals or Microsoft Office. For details about Crystal Reports Server 2008, please see: www.businessobjects.com/product/catalog/crystalreports_server.

“We continue to see a tremendous need in the marketplace for these tailor-made solutions that help alleviate key midmarket pain areas,” said Todd Rowe, group vice president and general manager, Volume Business Unit, Business Objects, an SAP company. “Particularly with today’s tepid economy, organizations of all sizes are struggling to reduce IT costs and maximize their return on IT investments while optimizing business performance. Business intelligence is becoming a ‘must have’ for successful organizations and today we are making this essential tool that much more accessible to small and midsize enterprises.”

Both BusinessObjects Edge 3.0 and Crystal Reports Server 2008 are currently generally available in 12 languages from Business Objects and its certified partner community. For more information on solutions for the midmarket from Business Objects, please visit: www.businessobjects.com/product/platforms/midmarket.asp. For more information on BI for midsize companies, view the June 26, 2008 Webinar.

About Business Objects
Business Objects, an SAP company, transforms the way the world works by connecting people, information and businesses. With open, heterogeneous applications in the areas of governance, risk and compliance; enterprise performance management; and business intelligence, Business Objects enables organizations of all sizes worldwide to close the loop between business strategy and execution. Together with a strong and diverse partner network, Business Objects allows customers to optimize business performance across all major industries including banking, retail, consumer products and public sector. Business Objects is committed to helping customers turn raw data into actionable decisions, regardless of their underlying database, operating system, applications or IT system.

For more information about Business Objects, visit: www.businessobjects.com.
For more information about SAP, visit: www.sap.com.

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