Business Objects, a Silicon Valley company started by French entrepreneurs, specializes business intelligence (BI) solutions. It recently announced that its Business Objects XI software "significantly outperformed Cognos ReportNet in benchmark tests conducted by VeriTest, a leading independent software testing firm. The performance test results from VeriTest, a division of Lionbridge (Nasdaq: LIOX), show that BusinessObjects XI delivers more than 21 times higher throughput than Cognos ReportNet. In addition, the response times for BusinessObjects XI remain consistently fast as the number of users increased, while the response times for Cognos ReportNet became considerably slower."

"The VeriTest performance benchmark results confirm what customers, prospects, and analysts who have worked with BusinessObjects XI and Cognos ReportNet have been telling us all the time," said Rene Bonvanie, chief marketing officer at Business Objects. "Organizations choose BusinessObjects XI over Cognos ReportNet because performance and scalability are critical requirements for their enterprise BI deployments.  To get the proven performance, scalability, and reliability of an established and production tested BI architecture, there is only one choice - BusinessObjects XI. Once and for all we can put to rest the claims from Cognos that ReportNet provides anything revolutionary, and Cognos customers should be seriously concerned that ReportNet is the foundation for Cognos 8."

Specific highlights of the VeriTest performance tests were as follows:

• When processing operational-style reports at capacity load for 30 minutes, BusinessObjects XI processed 12,691 reports, while Cognos ReportNet processed only 595 reports
• When processing complex business reports at capacity load for 30 minutes, BusinessObjects XI processed 4,240 reports, while Cognos ReportNet processed only 1,099 reports
• While processing both the operational-style and complex business reports in the test configuration, the response rate for BusinessObjects XI remained essentially unchanged as new users were added to the system, while the response time for Cognos ReportNet slowed considerably as new users were added

To read the full VeriTest performance benchmark report, please visit http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/businessobjects.

"A good business intelligence platform should provide the highest levels of performance and scalability - something BusinessObjects XI clearly delivers and Cognos ReportNet does not," said Herve Couturier, senior vice president of products at Business Objects. "Business Objects has focused its research and development effort on producing a BI platform that delivers innovative functionality and can stand up to the rigorous demands of our customers. The results from VeriTest clearly demonstrate the competitive performance and total cost of ownership advantage BusinessObjects XI customers have over Cognos customers in enterprise scale business intelligence environments."

The VeriTest performance tests, which directly compare BusinessObjects XI to Cognos ReportNet, were conducted with recommended default installations, running equivalent reports, under similar hardware configurations. The tests were designed to show how each system performed under the stress of both increasing and sustained load. VeriTest used Mercury LoadRunner to represent the overall system load with report processing and viewing requests, and aimed to measure overall capacity, response times, and scalability. The tests were conducted at VeriTest's North Carolina lab using HP ProLiant DL servers running Microsoft Windows 2000.