New Kalido(R) Information Engine(TM) Unlocks True Business Intelligence: Ground-breaking business-model-driven technology improves BI effectiveness and transforms how businesses manage corporate performance

Kalido, the active information management company, today announced a breakthrough approach to enhancing enterprise business intelligence (BI) systems that will dramatically increase the speed and quality of corporate business decisions. A suite of products based on the experience at hundreds of successful client deployments, the Kalido(R) Information Engine(TM) creates a common, enterprise-wide foundation that streamlines how key performance questions get asked and answered. Working in unison with existing transaction systems, data warehouses and front-end BI tools, the Kalido Information Engine brings new levels of flexibility and insight to corporate decision-making that change how, and the cost at which, business gets done. (See related releases, "Kalido Boosts BI Results with Significant Advancements to Data Warehousing Capabilities" and "Kalido Unveils Industry's First Visual Business Modeler for Business Intelligence.")

BURLINGTON, Mass. (Business Wire EON) January 22, 2008 -- Kalido, the active information management company, today announced a breakthrough approach to enhancing enterprise business intelligence (BI) systems that will dramatically increase the speed and quality of corporate business decisions. A suite of products based on the experience at hundreds of successful client deployments, the Kalido® Information Engine™ creates a common, enterprise-wide foundation that streamlines how key performance questions get asked and answered. Working in unison with existing transaction systems, data warehouses and front-end BI tools, the Kalido Information Engine brings new levels of flexibility and insight to corporate decision-making that change how, and the cost at which, business gets done. (See related releases, “Kalido Boosts BI Results with Significant Advancements to Data Warehousing Capabilities” and “Kalido Unveils Industry’s First Visual Business Modeler for Business Intelligence.”)

BI can be time-consuming to implement initially and is often costly to modify when business needs change

Following a year of momentous change in the BI landscape – marked by the Oracle, SAP and IBM acquisitions of Hyperion, Business Objects and Cognos, respectively – the Kalido Information Engine addresses one of enterprise computing’s inconvenient truths: Despite the increasing sophistication of business intelligence systems and the billions invested to date on BI initiatives, the promise of BI remains largely unfulfilled. According to Gartner's survey of CIOs, “Only 36% believe their management is using the right information to run the business.” (Source: Gartner, November 2007, “Highlights from the BIIM Track at Symposium/ITExpo” by Bill Hostmann).

“BI can be time-consuming to implement initially and is often costly to modify when business needs change,” said Henry Morris, Senior VP for Worldwide Software and Services Research at IDC. “Kalido's Information Engine enables business and IT to work together in maintaining a high-level business model that reflects current requirements and is the basis for generating BI structures. In its ability to manage metadata, handle changes over time and seamlessly connect to popular databases and BI front ends, Kalido earns a valuable place in the software stack as an enabler of BI.”

Composed of the Kalido suite of products - the new Kalido Business Information Modeler™, Kalido’s flagship Dynamic Information Warehouse™, Kalido Master Data Management™ and Kalido Universal Information Director™) - the Kalido Information Engine implements best practices to help customers rapidly design, develop and deploy their BI infrastructure drastically faster than traditional hand-coding or ETL-based methods. This speed is delivered through significant automation that reduces and even eliminates previously manual processes, such as the generation of data warehouses, data marts and BI reports. The combination of this automation with Kalido’s powerful business modeling capabilities advances closer collaboration between business users and IT professionals, reducing the disconnect between the two and ensuring greater alignment to quickly respond to changes in the business.

"Gaining true intelligence about any organization can be a challenge - requiring transparency, a common information model and integration across multiple departments, divisions and products," said Steve Cembrinski, Senior Vice President, Information & Technology Services, at New York Central Mutual. "With Kalido's Information Engine powering our business intelligence infrastructure, we expect to gain an incredible amount of insight and flexibility. The business model approach has really enabled our team to merge multiple data sources and views into one coherent view across the enterprise, something that would have been much more difficult with a traditional data warehouse and custom-programmed BI infrastructure."

By instantly adapting to meet changing business conditions, the Kalido Information Engine quickly delivers more accurate, consistent and reliable information to business intelligence tools, leading to improved analytical performance and better, timely decision-making for significant top-line growth and bottom-line savings opportunities.

Kalido’s unique business model-driven approach enables companies to easily design and change business models as needed. Business models can be developed collaboratively with corporate sponsors and IT and then shared across business units or departments to speed the development and delivery of new reports. Kalido’s best-practice workflow capability ensures only harmonized and aligned data is deployed to the business intelligence solution, resulting in more comprehensive and accurate BI reports. In addition, customers can keep track of before and after scenarios, enabling them to compare today’s view of the business to any point in time – even into the future.

"Year after year, CIOs cite business intelligence as a top priority," said Wyatt Mullin, vice president, Global ISV Channel at Business Objects. "With the Kalido Information Engine behind their BusinessObjects BI, customers get an end-to-end BI infrastructure that delivers the right information to make smart decisions, making them more productive while reducing internal costs."

“Every company in the world is challenged with the complex transformation of corporate data to actionable information,” said Bill Hewitt, president and CEO of Kalido. “That’s not a reflection of BI solutions, but rather what’s behind them – data and processes that are too often managed on spreadsheets, reliant on manually-intensive custom coding, and subject to misinterpretation. With the Kalido Information Engine behind your BI, the infrastructure is itself intelligent, fully automated and business model-driven. This combination can deliver true intelligence to the organization.”

About Kalido

Kalido delivers active information management for business. Developed through years of successful best practice implementations, Kalido's robust, business model-driven information management engine automatically feeds information to end users through their BI tools, making them more productive far more quickly and reducing internal costs. With Kalido, users never again have to wait for months to answer fundamental questions about business performance – which products are selling, which customers are profitable, and which markets are most promising.

Kalido software is installed at over 250 locations in more than 100 countries with market leading companies. More information about Kalido can be found at: http://www.kalido.com.