IBI Outlines E-biz Plans

In a bid to raise its profile in the E-business market, Information Builders Inc. today outlined its strategy for enhancing its data integration and business intelligence software for E-business applications. That development effort, which will include new versions of its core products tuned for E-business tasks, is being accompanied by a massive sales and marketing push--all under IBI's new "I-Business" ("I" for "intelligent") initiative.

At the core of IBI's plans are its WebFocus business intelligence suite and EDA middleware for integrating disparate data sources throughout a company. New versions of both products are under development and are scheduled for release in January.

The planned enhancements for both software products include Extensible Markup Language capabilities, including the ability to generate XML-based documents; support for portable computing devices such as 3Com's Palm Pilot; and new financial reporting capabilities. The products will also provide scalability enhancements such as server load balancing. "Customers are getting more ambitious in the size of the applications they are deploying," said Gerald Cohen, CEO and president of IBI.

Cohen outlined the I-Business strategy before a boisterous crowd of more than 1,000 IBI employees in New York, where the vendor is based. Cohen and other IBI executives said that while IBI has primarily marketed its wares to technical managers in the past, the new strategy is designed to capture the attention of business managers and senior executives.