BUSINESSOBJECTS DEPLOYED AS FRONT-END TO SIMON & SCHUSTER DATA WAREHOUSE

Users Across the U.S. Employ BUSINESSOBJECTS to Query, Analyze, and Report
on Strategic Corporate Data

CUPERTINO, CA, MARCH 29, 1996 -- Business Objects today announced that a
division of Simon & Schuster, the world's largest educational publisher,
has successfully implemented a strategic data warehouse utilizing
BUSINESSOBJECTS for data query, analysis, and reporting. Business, sales,
marketing, and inventory managers in Simon & Schuster's Elementary
Education Division use BUSINESSOBJECTS to tap into a wealth of corporate
data such as information on customer purchasing patterns, sales figures,
inventory, and purchasing. This empowers the end users to make more
informed, strategic decisions and saves Simon & Schuster time and money by
not requiring constant involvement from the Information Systems (IS)
staff.

Using BUSINESSOBJECTS, more than 60 Simon & Schuster employees in five
states can independently retrieve data stored in the division's data
warehouse, analyze the information, and create customized reports, all
from their desktops. Prior to BUSINESSOBJECTS, end users needing specific
data had to wait for IS-generated reports, which could take more than
three weeks. This new ability to autonomously access data allows managers
to gain competitive advantage by gauging market fluctuations, analyzing
purchasing patterns, and spotting market opportunities Additionally,
inventory managers can now access historical customer and sales data
stored in the data warehouse to effectively plan inventory and
purchasing.

"We needed a tool that would allow our business managers to get information
that they need using their own business language," said Vincent Benenati,
Simon & Schuster Director of IS, Elementary Education Division.
"BUSINESSOBJECTS provided the best technology to shield our users from the
technical data schema of the database, and backed up its technology with a
solid, market-leading company." The Elementary Education Division chose
BUSINESSOBJECTS over a number of query and reporting and relational
on-line analytical processing (OLAP) tools.

The Elementary Education Division needed to deliver a decision support
solution to its business managers as IS time was increasingly consumed
with executing requests for ad hoc data extracts from business users who
needed information outside of the division's paper-based, standardized
mainframe reports. Dave Cappelucci, senior vice president and business
manager for Simon & Schuster's Elementary Education Division, said, "Our
vision is to deliver all of the information our users need to effectively
do their jobs directly to their desktop, and BUSINESSOBJECTS and the data
warehouse are an important part of this vision."

The Elementary Education Division's data warehouse holds 10 years of
historical customer and sales information. Each week, data is downloaded
from Simon & Schuster's production systems into a Sybase relational
database, which acts as the data warehouse. End users access the
datawarehouse using BUSINESSOBJECTS on Windows 3.1 and Macintosh on IBM's
RS/6000.

About Simon & Schuster

Simon & Schuster is the world's largest educational publisher and is a
division of Viacom Inc.

About Business Objects

Business Objects (NASDAQ: BOBJY) is a leading provider of enterprise
decision support tools that deliver access to data stored in corporate
databases, data warehouses, and packaged applications. The company
pioneered the market for business-intelligent decision support tools in
1990 with the introduction of its flagship product, BUSINESSOBJECTS, the
first decision support tool to use a "semantic layer" to map complex
database schemas to a business representation understandable by mainstream
business users. Business Objects generated over $60M in revenue in 1995,
concluding its fifth consecutive year of more than 100% revenue growth.
BUSINESSOBJECTS has been licensed in more than 50 countries to over 2,900
customer sites and 160,000 users worldwide. Business Objects partners with
more than 350 leading third- party vendors including Arbor Software,
Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Informix, Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Prism, Red
Brick, Sun, and Sybase. Strategic resellers include Bull, Digital,
Fujitsu, NCR, Price Waterhouse, Sequent, SHL, Siemens Nixdorf, Toshiba,
and Unisys. More information on Business Objects can be found on the World
Wide Web at http://www.businessobjects.com.
 
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