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Information Builders Marks Anniversary With New Strategy
Information Builders marked the approach of its silver anniversary by unveiling a new global corporate identity strategy that features the slogan "i-business Changes Everything." Information Builders' President and CEO Gerald Cohen stated, "i-business means integrating and leveraging every critical piece of a corporation's data, regardless of origin, and delivering it over the Web as valuable and usable information. This information can then be easily accessed and shared by employees, customers and business partners around the globe."
The first part of the i-business rollout will be a print advertising campaign that is scheduled to break in major news and business publications such as the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek.
According to Information Builders' Vice President of Marketing, Michael Corcoran, "In the past, we did a good job of direct marketing to technical managers. However, as an increasing number of business managers and senior executives use the Web as their preferred source of information delivery, our business intelligence and enterprise integration technologies become relevant to them. Our new campaign, developed in conjunction with our new agency of record TFA/Leo Burnett, takes our message and media strategy to a higher level in order to reach these business users and explain how our core technologies can increase the ROI of their e-commerce and e-business initiatives."
Corcoran adds that establishing the i-business category will be the cornerstone of Information Builders' aggressive new plan for global expansion over the next several years. "Our ultimate goal is to be a billion-dollar corporation. Part of that goal is to increase the number of authorized integrators and VARs that can help us sell into midsize companies and within specialized vertical markets. In addition, we'll continue to strengthen our partnerships with other technology leaders because we believe our technology can add complementary value and functionality to some of their enterprise solutions. In order to meet these goals, we need a strong position and high visibility in the marketplace. We're confident that our new corporate identity campaign will help us achieve this."
Corcoran predicts that the i-business campaign will set new sales benchmarks for Information Builders' successful direct sales organization, which includes 26 U.S. sales, support and consulting offices, 3 Canadian offices, 8 international subsidiaries and 31 agents worldwide. "These are the people who have helped Information Builders develop a huge global install base over the last 25 years. The i-business campaign and strategy will help them expand our prominent roster of customers, which includes Ford Motor Company, Siemens, Bell Atlantic, Nissan, Telecom Argentina, Microsoft, Royal Bank of Canada, FedEx, Volkswagen GEDAS, NASA and Sony."
A sizable portion of the increased revenue generated by the i-business campaign will be funneled back into research and development explains Cohen. "Over the past 25 years, we've helped our customers make the leap from mainframe to client/server to the desktop and to the Web. We've been very good at anticipating each shift in information technology and we will continue to do so. In the near future, you can expect announcements regarding our support for XML and, more specifically, Office 2000. In addition, we'll be scaling our business intelligence and enterprise integration technologies for use in wireless and handheld devices. The 'i' in i-business also stands for innovation."
For more information, visit www.informationbuilders.com.