Macy`s Finds a Perfect Fit With Information Builders

America`s Department Store Packages Promotional Efficiency With Business Intelligence

New York, NY FEBRUARY 23, 2006 Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today announced that Macy`s East recently chose WebFOCUS as a reporting environment to gain critical visibility into the effectiveness of advertising placement and product decisions to increase retail sales. By delivering accurate business information to buyers, advertising executives, and marketing personnel, Macy`s East can react to customers` buying trends by promoting and offering the products customers desire the most.

According to Roman Master, director of IT, Macy`s East and Macy`s Home Store Advertising, "We needed to get our ad information into one central database, then implement user-friendly reporting tools so executives, advertising personnel, and buyers could access critical information without constant oversight by the IT department." By empowering its geographically dispersed users with a self-service easy-to-use reporting platform through WebFOCUS, Macy`s is enabling developers to build new applications and streamline business processes rather than writing reports, delivering operational efficiencies.

With 157 stores on the East Coast earning billions of dollars in annual revenue, Macy`s East has been a major force in the retail industry for decades. With its flagship Herald Square store in New York City reigning as the world`s largest store, it prides itself on delivering the high-quality, fashionable merchandise its loyal customer base expects.

To ensure that consistency and maintain a competitive advantage, Macy`s needed better access to data on how their ads affect retail sales, as well as the ability to aggregate various databases to deliver a single view of its marketing strategies and inventory status. Additionally, Macy`s required BI tools designed for end users, not just IT professionals. Prior to implementing WebFOCUS, Macy`s Home Store Advertising lacked automation for some of its key advertising planning and turn-in processes much of which was done manually using Excel spreadsheets.

"Access to data is the real issue for our marketing and advertising managers," said Master. "We are replacing Excel files with a dynamic reporting environment that is online and when it changes we can react and build our marketing strategies accordingly. We have never had this level of accuracy before."

Currently, Macy`s Home Store Advertising is planning all of its ad campaigns for the spring and fall 2006 seasons including catalogs, newspaper ads, and TV spots. Information on these highly-detailed campaigns is now stored in the BI application, where managers can easily access it for planning purposes. They can now monitor which types of ads are running in different regions, and what merchandise is being promoted. They can then run analysis reports that summarize this information at multiple levels and output reports in different formats including HTML, Excel and PDF.

Macy`s considered other BI tools from market-leading vendors; however they ultimately selected Information Builders` WebFOCUS platform because of the end-user reporting capabilities, rapid and efficient implementation capabilities, and lower total cost of ownership than the other vendors.

"In today`s highly competitive retail market and with new consumer dynamics changing the way retailers market their products, Macy`s is leading an era of organizations who understand the value of gaining better insight into their promotional efforts and customer buying trends by using business intelligence strategies," said Gerald Cohen, CEO, Information Builders. "By working with a prestigious retail leader, we are demonstrating the benefits of WebFOCUS in today`s real-time, event-driven enterprise."

About Information Builders
Information Builders is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time operational reporting. The company`s WebFOCUS product the industry`s most scalable, secure, and flexible is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS` empowerment of organizations seeking to leverage all their data by accessing it all from legacy to data warehouse is unmatched.

Information Builders` award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services for 30 years to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,750 people and has over 350 business partners. For more information, visit www.informationbuilders.com.

About Macy`s East
As of February 2006, Macy`s East, with corporate offices in New York, owns and operates 157 stores in twelve Eastern states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, under the names of Macy`s, Filene`s, Hecht`s, Kaufmann`s and Strawbridge`s. Known for its fashion and affordable luxury, the company is synonymous with spectacular events including the world famous Macy`s Thanksgiving Day Parade , Macy`s 4th of July Fireworks and the Macy`s Flower Show . Macy`s Herald Square, the company`s flagship store, is the World`s Largest Store.