Groundbreaking New Approach Dramatically Reduces TCO for Operational BI

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 11 / -- Celequest, the leading provider of operational business intelligence (BI), today announced general availability of LAVA(TM), the industry's first appliance designed to bring critical BI information to thousands of users at the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO). The LAVA appliance includes data integration, analytics, end-user dashboards and tools for collaboration, plugs into a company's existing network and can be up and running in just a few days.

According to a 2006 study by IDC, only 15% of employees in an average organization have access to business intelligence information. Use of BI technology has generally been limited to knowledge workers in corporate functions, such as financial planning or marketing, because traditional BI technology is too costly to deploy to large numbers of operational users. Companies have also found that operational workers in functional areas such as logistics or call centers often lack the necessary skills to handle BI software that was designed for analysts and power users.

LAVA removes the barriers to widespread BI adoption by layering intuitive, self-service dashboards on top of a unique architecture that was built from the ground up to deliver fresh information to massive numbers of users, while delivering these capabilities in an appliance that dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of deployment.

"LAVA, the new appliance version of Celequest's breakthrough technology, gives companies the ability to roll out operational BI and performance dashboards to their entire organization for a fraction of the cost of traditional BI solutions," said Diaz Nesamoney, founder and chief executive officer of Celequest. "LAVA enables companies to provide up-to-the-minute business information to thousands of operational workers, empowering decision- makers across the organization to spot emerging trends, immediately take action when problems arise and positively affect their company's bottom line. This approach represents a quantum leap over the capabilities of traditional BI solutions."

"IDC's research shows that data warehouse appliances have attractive price/performance characteristics," said Dan Vesset, Research Director, Analytics and Data Warehousing at IDC. "Celequest's LAVA extends the appliance concept to address end-user facing functionality. We believe that the packaging of Celequest's event-driven BI technology as an appliance marks an important event in the BI market."

Self-Service, Scalable BI System with Low TCO

LAVA was architected specifically for large-scale operational BI deployments and is fueled by Celequest's patent-pending streaming data flow engine, which provides continuous integration of operational and historical data, time-based calculations, business rules processing and event-driven alerting. Award-winning Performance Dashboard technology displays information in an intuitive, personalized format so that any user can immediately see what is happening in the key areas of business operations. LAVA delivers this information to users in less than one second, regardless of user volume.

Buying hundreds or thousands of new seat licenses for traditional BI software (and the servers to support them) can be cost-prohibitive, but one low-cost LAVA appliance can support thousands of users and includes unlimited seat licenses and support for unlimited dashboards and data sources. Self-service Performance Dashboards also enable LAVA users to customize and personalize their dashboards without assistance from IT, dramatically reducing the cost of user maintenance. Built using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), LAVA can be immediately linked up to any SOA-compliant data sources and applications, further supporting fast, easy deployment.

Key LAVA components include:

-- Performance Dashboards: BI information and performance metrics are presented in a graphically rich dashboard that can be customized and easily modified by individual users as business conditions change.

-- Analytics Server: A highly scalable, memory-based engine that continuously integrates operational and historical data and provides rich analytical capabilities. The Analytics Server publishes key metrics and alerts to users, minimizing response times between new information and action.

-- Application Workbench: IT administrators use the Application Workbench to specify the data sources and applications to monitor as well as the baseline business views to be modeled by the system.LAVA in Action at Cendant

Cendant Hospitality recently implemented a new system to handle the increased volume and complexity of hotel availability searches across its many channels, including travel sites, hotel web sites, and travel agents. In this environment, where a few seconds of downtime can add up to significant lost revenue, the company realized that they would need a way to continuously monitor the new system. Cendant is using LAVA to give the company immediate visibility into system performance and provide front-line decision-makers with instant access to the information they need to keep the system up and running.

"Our existing BI systems provide historical analysis and periodic reporting, but LAVA was the only product that could give operational users immediate visibility into the performance of our new system and alert them when performance issues arose. With early warning of emerging problems within the system, we're able to take fast corrective action to reduce downtime," said Nick Forte, Director of Application Architecture, Cendant Hotels IT. "Celequest's dashboards are intuitive and clear - our team doesn't have to perform in-depth analysis to get the answers we need to make decisions. This is of tremendous value as we expand use of LAVA into more areas of the business."

Pricing and Availability

The standard configuration of LAVA is now generally available for $125,000. This configuration includes unlimited seat licenses and support for unlimited dashboards and data sources. To talk to a Celequest sales representative about LAVA, please call 650-598-0300, or contact Celequest toll-free at 866-786-1500.

About Celequest

Celequest is the leading provider of operational business intelligence (BI) solutions. Celequest's award-winning technology is the foundation of LAVA(TM), the industry's first BI appliance that enables companies to provide up-to-the-minute business information to thousands of operational workers, empowering decision-makers across the organization to spot emerging trends, immediately take action when problems arise and positively affect their company's bottom line. Celequest customers include Citigroup, Fifth Third Bancorp, NCO, Jefferies, Software Spectrum, Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream Holdings, the Clorox Company, Brocade and Cendant Corporation. Celequest is a privately held company based in Redwood City, California. For more information about Celequest, please visit www.celequest.com.

CONTACT: Alp Pekkocak of Celequest, +1-650-637-2172, or apekkocak@celequest.com