Business Objects to Acquire Firstlogic, Inc.

Business Objects, a leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, announced February 8, 2006, that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Firstlogic, Inc., a global provider of enterprise data quality solutions and services. Building on the company's EIM (enterprise information management) strategy, this acquisition is intended to provide customers with a single, consistent view of their business, improve the trust and confidence in the information needed to make better decisions, and accelerate compliance initiatives.

The acquisition will be an all-cash transaction of approximately $69 million, and the transaction will be accounted for under the purchase method of accounting. In 2006, the transaction is expected to be accretive to Business Objects on a non-GAAP basis and dilutive on a GAAP basis due to one time charges and purchase accounting adjustments. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, and is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2006.

"Building a business intelligence strategy without a complete EIM solution is like trying to complete a puzzle without all the pieces," said John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects. "With today's acquisition of Firstlogic, Business Objects acquires one of the most important pieces of the EIM puzzle -- data quality. Business Objects is the only BI vendor that provides a complete EIM solution, enabling trustworthy, timely, and actionable information. This acquisition will strengthen our competitive advantage as customers increasingly standardize on one platform, and will give our customers the capabilities they need to create truly world class, game-changing business intelligence deployments."

"EIM will play an increasingly vital role in the business intelligence market," continued Schwarz. "As companies face the multiple pressures of regulatory compliance, expanding numbers of data sources, the need for real-time operations, and the ability to link data to performance management initiatives, customers are demanding an EIM solution that can help them scale with these fast changing dynamics. This is why Business Objects is investing in EIM solutions, and why we believe this will be an important growth driver for our company in the years to come."

"Unlike other business intelligence vendors, Business Objects has a deep commitment to data integration, as seen in its world-class ETL (extraction, transformation, and load) tool and recent acquisition of EII (enterprise information integration) technology," said Philip Russom, senior manager of research at The Data Warehousing Institute. "But data integration inexorably reveals data quality issues, whether problems to be fixed or opportunities to be leveraged. Business Objects' acquisition of Firstlogic recognizes that best practices demand tight interoperability between data integration and data quality."

Firstlogic is a privately held company with 2005 revenues in excess of $50 million and is a recognized leader in data quality. For over 20 years, Firstlogic has provided technology solutions, services, education, and consulting to help businesses establish confidence in the data driving their businesses. Firstlogic offers enterprise data quality management solutions that support the full breadth of data quality capabilities including initial data assessment and measurement, data cleansing, data enrichment, matching and consolidation, and continuous monitoring.

Over 6,000 customers worldwide have selected Firstlogic as their partner of choice for ensuring the quality of their information within data warehouse and business intelligence systems, customer and master data integration programs, CRM applications, transaction environments such as call centers and Web sites, and other enterprise initiatives. Firstlogic and Business Objects have been technology partners since April 2004 and currently support joint customers including Harry & David Operations Corporation, National Offender Management Service (UK), and Omnium Worldwide.

Business Objects also announced an expanded reseller agreement with Firstlogic, enabling the company to resell Firstlogic's match consolidation technology, which is already tightly integrated with BusinessObjects Data Integrator.

"Today's announcement affirms the importance of data quality technology to ensuring that business decisions are made on a foundation of correct and complete data," said Eric Lieberman, president of Firstlogic, Inc. "We expect this acquisition to help customers build a stronger BI infrastructure, thus accelerating the growth and success of their BI deployments and giving them a more accurate view of their business."