Business Objects to Acquire Text Analytics Leader Inxight Software
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Combination of Inxight and Business Objects to Deliver First Full
Spectrum Business Intelligence Platform
BERLIN - (BUSINESS WIRE) - Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ) (Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 -
BOB), the world’s leading provider of business
intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced it has entered into a
definitive agreement to acquire Inxight Software, Inc. Based in
Sunnyvale, Calif., Inxight is a leading provider of software solutions
for unstructured information discovery, including text analytics,
federated search, and data visualization. Financial details of the
transaction, which is expected to close in July of 2007, were not
disclosed.
The combination of Business Objects and Inxight Software will provide
organizations with a comprehensive BI solution to address all of their
data assets. With the combined technology, companies will now have
streamlined access to both structured information within databases and
data warehouses, and unstructured information such as emails, documents,
notes fields, and web content that is estimated to comprise more than 80
percent of all organizational data. Inxight brings a compelling
combination of text analytics, federated search, and visualization
capabilities to the BusinessObjects XI platform to enable customers to
easily discover, manage, and analyze unstructured content inside and
outside of their organization.
“The addition of Inxight to the Business
Objects portfolio will give our customers unsurpassed capabilities in
the BI industry and once again raises the bar for true business
intelligence,” said John Schwarz, CEO of
Business Objects. “Our customers want to use
the full spectrum of available data to make the best decisions possible
and drive optimized organizational performance. Federated search, text
analytics, and unstructured data access are a natural and inherent part
of business intelligence, and represent an untapped source of knowledge
which most organizations have yet to harvest. Whether it’s
looking at fraud detection, regulatory compliance, the voice of the
customer, or intelligence and counter-terrorism, text analytics can help
predict important events before they happen and find opportunities
before the competition.”
Inxight Software is a privately-held company, with more than 120
employees and 2006 revenues in excess of $25 million. Born out of Xerox
PARC, Inxight is a recognized leader in providing innovative solutions
for unstructured information discovery across 32 languages. Inxight
customers include Air Products, AOL, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley,
Novartis, and Thomson, as well as multiple U.S. and foreign government
agencies such as the Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency,
Department of Homeland Security, and Commonwealth Secretariat. The
company has more than 300 software OEM agreements with companies
including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and SAS. Inxight is already a
member of the Business Objects Technology Partner Program.
“We’re excited to
join the Business Objects team, and already see incredible opportunities
for synergies and applications of our technology,”
said Ian Bonner, president and CEO of Inxight. “BusinessObjects
XI will provide cleansing, auditing, and data processing capabilities
that no other text analytics solutions currently possess, while the
Business Objects reporting, analysis and dashboards will allow text
analysis to be delivered in a familiar way to a very large audience. We
will be able to quickly and easily incorporate text analytics and
unstructured data into the decision-making workflows of millions of
information workers and start to bring these technologies into the
mainstream.”
Delivering Full Spectrum Business Intelligence
Traditional business intelligence offerings focus on accessing,
analyzing, and sharing information almost exclusively from structured
sources such as operational systems and data warehouses. While this
information is very useful in helping companies improve performance, it
represents only a small fraction of the available data within an
organization. Such structured data doesn’t
provide a view into the human side of information –
the unstructured thoughts, feelings, and emotions of customers,
partners, and employees that are typically captured in unstructured
formats.
Business Objects is aiming to break down the barriers to full spectrum
BI, and deliver the first solution that natively combines both
structured and unstructured data across all areas of business
intelligence – from enterprise information
management to information discovery and delivery to performance
management. This will help customers combine both quantitative and
qualitative information to gain a more complete and accurate view of
their business.
Inxight’s suite of products includes powerful
search federation; summarization, categorization, and clustering; fact
and entity extraction; taxonomy creation; and visualization. These
products support the analysis and understanding of relationships,
trends, timelines, and patterns in data that would otherwise go
unnoticed.
For example, Inxight technology is being used in the analysis of
customer interactions in call centers and online customer chat sessions,
which are typically inaccessible by traditional BI systems. This
analysis can uncover customer dissatisfaction and product and pricing
issues earlier, resulting in faster, proactive product changes and
customer communications. Inxight’s text
analytics software is also being used to uncover risk areas in email,
such as private or sensitive data leaving an organization in violation
of internal or externally mandated policy.
With this acquisition, Business Objects expands its leadership in
extending BI to embrace enterprise search. Going beyond basic keyword
searches and solutions that simply provide a ranked listing of searched
items, Inxight’s web services-based federated
search and extraction capabilities extend the value of enterprise search
engines by instantly clustering and filtering results from multiple
search engines, including Google Search Appliance and Oracle Secure
Enterprise Search. By providing a BI platform that leverages these
capabilities, Business Objects will become the first vendor to bridge
the gap between search and intelligence –
delivering a broader view of data and dramatically accelerating the
ability to locate hidden information in search results that might
otherwise be overlooked.
About Inxight
Inxight Software, Inc. is the leading provider of enterprise software
solutions for information discovery. Using Inxight solutions,
organizations can access and analyze unstructured, semi-structured and
structured text to extract key information to enable business
intelligence. Inxight is the only company that provides a complete,
scalable solution enabling information discovery in more than 30
languages. The company has offices throughout the United States and
Europe. For more information, visit www.inxight.com
or call 1-408-738-6200 or +44 (0) 1252 761314.
About Business Objects
Business Objects has been a pioneer in business intelligence (BI) since
the dawn of the category. Today, as the world’s
leading BI software company, Business Objects transforms the way the
world works through intelligent information. The company helps
illuminate understanding and decision-making at more than 43,000
organizations around the globe. Through a combination of innovative
technology, global consulting and education services, and the industry’s
strongest and most diverse partner network, Business Objects enables
companies of all sizes to make transformative business decisions based
on intelligent, accurate, and timely information.
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.
Safe Harbor for Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve
risks and uncertainties concerning the proposed acquisition of Inxight,
Business Objects’ product and business
strategies, including the products we intend to acquire from Inxight,
the anticipated benefits to customers and partners resulting from the
closing of the acquisition and the timing of the closing of the
acquisition. Actual events or results may differ materially from those
described in this press release due to a number of risks and
uncertainties. These potential risks and uncertainties include, among
others, our ability to attract and retain customer support for, and to
generate revenue from, Inxight products, the outcome of regulatory
reviews of the transaction, the ability of the parties to complete the
proposed transaction, Business Objects’
ability to retain Inxight employees and Business Objects’
ability to realize other financial benefits from the proposed
acquisition. More information about potential factors that could affect
Business Objects’ business and financial
results is included in Business Objects’ Form
10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2007 which is on file with the
Securities and Exchange Commission’s website
at www.sec.gov. Business Objects is not
obligated to update these forward–looking
statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this
document.
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