(Information Builders, Inc., New York, www.informationbuilders.com) A software company founded in 1975 by Gerald Cohen that specializes in enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web reporting. The company introduced its FOCUS database management system in its first year, which became known for its 4GL reporting capabilities. It was made available on a wide variety of hardware platforms and eventually supported a huge number of database and file types.

This interface experience became a natural for later developing its Enterprise Data Access (EDA) middleware tool, which opened all these databases to a larger variety of client applications than just via FOCUS. EDA has been widely used and became the foundation for WebFOCUS, which made all this data available via a Web browser. In 2001, Information Builders introduced a new software company, iWay Software, and transferred the EDA middleware to this spin-off. See FOCUS, EDA and WebFOCUS.