Lugano, Switzerland, April 15, 2008 – BOARD International, the leading global provider of Business Intelligence (BI) and Corporate Performance Management (CPM) toolkit software, has been recognised again by its users to deliver real technology and business benefits in The BI Survey 7, by Nigel Pendse.
The survey, the largest independent survey for BI products worldwide, was conducted across 60 countries and 32 industrial sectors, and analyzes data from over 1,900 BI software end users and consultants. It places BOARD ahead of established brands such as TM1, Business Objects, Cognos, SAP, MicroStrategy and Microsoft in key areas for the third time.
The global survey highlights that BOARD users enjoyed the biggest overall Business Benefit, compared to users of other tools. The Business Benefit in the survey consists of nine main benefits, which are:

Better business decision
Faster or more accurate reporting
Increased revenues
Improved customer satisfaction
Saved headcount in business departments
Saved headcount in IS
Reduced external IT costs
Saved other non-IT costs
Other
BOARD was especially praised by customers for its impact on increased revenues with 18 per cent more than the second best solution.
Ease-of-use for end-users was cited by 49 per cent of BOARD customers as a reason to buy, with ease-of-use for application builders coming in at 31 per cent. This placed BOARD at the top of all solutions for ease-of-use for application builders.
Regarding reliability BOARD was rated number one out of all the analyzed BI tools, with the fewest problems reported overall. BOARD provides the best support to its customers, sharing this top position with only one other vendor. Users experienced almost 50 per cent fewer performance issues compared to the average of all tools, placing BOARD in the top two for this category. Users rarely saw unacceptable query times, which not only enhanced user experience but increased productivity.
Many different departments and functions use BOARD such as sales, marketing, IT, administration, logistics, and top management, resulting in BOARD being ranked highest for being the most pervasive BI solution.
“This reflects BOARD’s programming-free toolkit approach that enables a flexible use throughout the whole company and in the most diverse functions. Based on one single development tool it is possible to build a huge variety of applications. That is a differentiation to many standard tools where different modules cover specific functions,” explains Dr. Carsten Bange, managing director at the BARC Institute.
BOARD was in the top two regarding least human resources involved in running and administering BI projects, achieving a median of only 0.5 people compared with an average of 1.5 people for all of the BI tools in the survey.
With all of those capabilities summarized, it becomes clear why BOARD is the tool most often chosen (82.3 per cent) after evaluations. “Once customers know BOARD - they want it,” annotates Giovanni Grossi, CEO at BOARD International. “In addition, almost half of our customers plan to buy more BOARD licences in the future and hereby they confirm that the BOARD toolkit is indeed a great product to work with. BOARD’s concept of one single integrated platform with MOLAP, ROLAP and all BI and CPM functions integrated for pervasive reporting, analysis, planning and simulation applications is proved right when we see the feedback in this years’ BI Survey. Especially in times of such a strong market consolidation as it currently happens on the BI and CPM market, it is important for us to care about customers needs and develop our product accordingly. Other vendors can’t focus on such things but need to concentrate on integration issues due to recent acquisitions,” outlines Grossi.
Nigel Pendse, independent analyst and author of The BI Survey 7, said: “BOARD’s consistent high ranking positions in many of the key areas we analysed in the survey is a remarkable achievement and isn’t just limited to technical aspects, such as the performance, reliability and support. BOARD also performed very well with regard to the key business criteria, mainly the business benefit index (BBI), but also rates of conversion from evaluation and buying intentions, which emphasizes again the solid strength of the product in a wide range of areas.”

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About The BI Survey 7
The BI Survey 7, conducted by Nigel Pendse, is the largest and most comprehensive independent survey of BI products. The survey was conducted across 60 countries and 32 industrial sectors, analysing data from 1,901 software implementations. This year 16 products or groups of products had enough usage to be analysed individually in this survey: MicroStrategy, Microsoft AS, TM1, Cognos Analysis, SAP BW/Netweaver BI, Cognos Reporting, BusinessObjects, Infor (MIS) Alea, BOARD, Panorama NovaView, Information Builders WebFOCUS, Cubeware Cockpit, Essbase, Microsoft RS, Crystal Reports and arcplan. For more information about The BI Survey 7 www.bi-survey.com.

About BOARD International
Founded in 1994, BOARD International is a global leader in the BI and CPM (Corporate Performance Management) Toolkit space. BOARD has enabled over 1,800 companies worldwide to rapidly deploy BI and CPM applications in a single integrated environment completely programming free and in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions. BOARD provides one accurate, corporate view of your information, fully integrated with your CPM processes (budgeting, forecasting, planning, reporting, KPI, score-carding etc) and therefore uniquely linking performance to strategic vision at all levels down to operational detail.