Sandnes, Norway —9 October 2009 – Profitbase AS, a global technology leader in delivering rapidly deployed business intelligence (BI) and planning solutions, today announced they have been elevated to the status of Global Alliance Partner by Microsoft. Profitbase provides their solutions to a number of different industries such as healthcare and manufacturing, with a very strong presence in the retail industry.

Profitbase was elevated to Global Alliance Partner status because of their commitment to Microsoft technology and business initiatives in the retail markets.

“The Profitbase-Microsoft solution improves retail operations to meet consumer demand with comprehensive business insight that enables demand-driven merchandizing,” notes Jan de Jong, worldwide industry solutions manager, Distribution & Services, Microsoft Corporation. “The Profitbase solution fully utilizes Microsoft technology to provide our retail customers with industry-standard analytics that match the various job roles found in the retail organization. When combined with Microsoft SharePoint and PerformancePoint capabilities, the solution empowers each user with the information they need to improve performance.”

Profitbase BI solutions are deployed with Profitbase Studio, the company's deployment accelerator software, and out-of-the-box business and connector templates. Data source connector templates have pre-engineered mappings to ERP and POS systems for quick connection and data extraction enabling related data from multiple business systems to be easily consolidated. Business templates that provide standard key performance indicators, metrics and data filtering criteria for areas like finance, sales, inventory, purchasing, retail point-of-sales (POS), healthcare, manufacturing and more, jump start implementations and reduce risk. Profitbase Studio, the company's BI deployment accelerator software, enables any template to be quickly and easily modified to address any unique information requirements. The combination of Profitbase Studio and the out-of-the-box template enables BI deployment times, cost and risk to be significantly reduced.

The combined Profitbase–Microsoft BI solution gives businesses one consolidated view of information resulting in 360 degree visibility to all aspects of business performance. The solution enables users to track and act on performance based on their roles in the organization. Regardless of their role, everyone from the CEO to department managers can monitor performance anytime, anywhere. Using a browser and role-based self-service BI interface, empowered users are able to sort, filter and drill to detail to root out problems and solve them quickly.

“We are honored and very happy that we are now a Global Alliance Partner for Microsoft. This designation is the result of a company-wide effort to bring functionally rich products and solutions that are quickly deployed to our customers throughout the world,” comments Borre Tharaldsen, managing director of Profitbase AS. “At Profitbase, we are committed to delivering better information faster so businesses can optimize their operations. Working closely with Microsoft on many fronts has enabled us to achieve this goal, so we are very excited about the future,” Tharaldsen adds.

Profitbase solutions also ensure continuity of business insight as new business systems are added through acquisition or system upgrades, protecting a company's investment in existing business systems and turning the hard to access data they hold into an asset. Businesses that deploy Profitbase solutions have access to better, more current information enabling them to be more agile and to make better and faster decisions.

Profitbase is a Microsoft Global Alliance Partner, a NRF ARTS member and chairs the ARTS Data Warehouse committee.

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Profitbase is a trademark of Profitbase AS. All other company, product or service names used herein are trademarks of their respective owners.