A Letter to Our Readers

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This issue of Information Builders Magazine has as its theme, "The Extended Enterprise." What we mean by this term is, all of those activities in an organization that involve people who may not be employees. These people may be customers, suppliers, partners, citizens, students or any of the other constituencies an organization deals with.

These Extended Enterprise activities are the most influenced by the new technologies of the Internet age. Dramatically cheaper communication costs as well as easy-to-use software – such as the Internet browser – now make it possible to share information and exchange information with these groups.

The examples we have assembled for you range from dramatic Return on Investment (ROI) situations to clear achievement of competitive advantage.We hope they will give you pause to ask yourself the question, "Are we communicating with our constituencies as well as we could, and what would it mean for us to do better?"

We hope you enjoy this issue. In it you will find some interesting interviews with industry leaders and a host of news and announcements.

And, as always, we would like to hear from you for our Letters to the Editor section.

Regards,
Gerald D. Cohen

P.S.: We are close to announcing the next release of both WebFOCUS and iWay, and some hints of what is new and exciting will be found in the articles by Information Builders staff. There are more than 450 new features throughout the products – so we have a lot to tell you about.