Building on the success of its Open Appliance Initiative, Business Objects, the world’s leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced it has partnered with leaders in the application delivery space – including Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS), rPath, and RightScale - to deliver a Crystal Reports® Server XI virtual appliance. The new offering is a pre-installed and pre-configured solution that will help reduce deployment time from days to minutes. In addition, for the first time, the two companies are offering customers a chance to instantly evaluate the product through a virtual ‘test-drive’, thus eliminating the cost and complexity typically associated with enterprise software evaluations.

“Today we are introducing a new, radically simplified way for small and mid-sized organizations to test drive and deploy the world’s favorite reporting solution,” said John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects. “We have worked closely with Open Appliance Initiative partners Citrix, rPath, and RightScale to help customers deploy our software more easily and effectively. With the Crystal Reports Server XI virtual appliance, our aim is to provide faster time-to-value for mid-market companies and provide them with the same benefits and business value long enjoyed by their enterprise counterparts.”

The partnership and collaboration between Citrix Systems and Business Objects underscores the growing importance of virtualization in the mid-market. With Citrix’s new line of virtual appliances based on the XenSource technology, customers with limited IT resources will be able to easily deploy a Business Objects solution and take advantage of the tremendous flexibility, security, and cost-saving benefits that virtualization can provide.

“We are excited to team with Business Objects to produce a virtualization solution that addresses all application delivery challenges for organizations of any size or industry,” said Mark Templeton, president & CEO, Citrix Systems. “We are now in an enviable position to virtualize, optimize, stream, secure, and manage any type of application for any customer delivery challenge.”

Open Appliance Initiative: Continued Innovation

rPath and RightScale, both members of the OAI, have contributed significant technology advancements towards the realization of today’s announcement:

“We transform enterprise applications into easy-to-use virtual appliances,” said Billy Marshall, CEO of rPath. “We are thrilled to partner with companies such as Citrix and RightScale to make these benefits a reality for Business Objects as they deliver their leading Crystal Reports Server as a virtual appliance.”

“Rightscale is delighted to help Business Objects enable pushbutton access to run trial versions of Crystal Reports Server in the cloud,” said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. “Business Objects, a pioneer ISV, is realizing the promise of cloud computing with Rightscale’s ability to launch and manage virtual software appliances for trial or production use.”

Availability

The Crystal Reports Server XI virtual appliance is expected to be generally available in Q1 2008.

For more information on the Crystal Reports Server XI virtual appliance, please visit www.rpath.com/crystalreports for a test drive. For more information on the Business Objects Open Appliance Initiative, please visit http://www.businessobjects.com/partners/oai/default.asp