Business Objects to acquire text analytics leader Inxight Software

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, California, Inxight is a leading provider of software solutions for unstructured information discovery, including text analytics, federated search, and data visualisation. Financial details of the transaction, which is expected to close in July 2007, were not disclosed.

The combination of Business Objects and Inxight Software will provide organisations 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 e-mails, documents, notes fields and Web content that is estimated to comprise more than 80% of all organisational data.

Inxight brings a compelling combination of text analytics, federated search and visualisation capabilities to the BusinessObjects XI platform to enable customers to easily discover, manage and analyse unstructured content inside and outside of their organisation.

"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 optimised organisational 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 organisations 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 recognised 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 US 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 Programme.

"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."

Traditional business intelligence offerings focus on accessing, analysing 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 organisation. 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; summarisation, categorisation, and clustering; fact and entity extraction; taxonomy creation; and visualisation. 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 centres 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 e-mail, such as private or sensitive data leaving an organisation 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.