-- Cognos Enables Higher Education Customers to Gain Deep Insight Into Operations, Enabling More Informed Decision-Making, Accurate Financial Reporting, and Stronger 'What If' Planning -- 2006 NACUBO, BOOTH # 919, HONOLULU, July 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that its industry-leading solutions are driving best-in-class performance at some of the world's most innovative higher education institutions. Cognos will be showcasing these solutions at the 2006 NACUBO Conference from July 10-12, 2006 in Honolulu, Hawaii (Booth 919). Increased competition in all aspects of higher education has underscored the need for higher education institutions to transform their data into valuable information that can drive better decisions. Through a more sophisticated view of their performance, Cognos enables universities to uncover and improve the performance of fundraising programs, identify and recruit the most desirable students, improve matriculation rates by tracking individual student performance across courses and disciplines, and increase tuition revenue and profitability through more informed management of curriculum and course offerings. The University of Texas at Austin faced significant financial constraints due to state budget limitations, funding challenges, and mandates inhibiting out-of-state student enrollment and revenues. By turning to Cognos business intelligence (BI), University administrators gained the information visibility they needed to optimize their financial resources. For instance, the University can now easily analyze how much business it has conducted by vendor, and whether those amounts are trending up or down over the years, allowing the school to negotiate better prices. Cognos has also streamlined financial reporting, helping save 700 person hours in compiling the University's 2005 annual report. On the academic side, Cognos has helped the University better manage its curriculum offerings, tracking trends in course enrollment, analyzing the relationship between curriculum and revenue, and identifying the classroom factors that lead to improved performance. "The key to our future success was having better information so we could make the right decisions. More often than not, it took people several weeks of sifting through spreadsheets and reports to find what they wanted -- whether it was the dean of liberal arts trying to figure out how many teaching assistants he needed, or the financial dean of the law school figuring out how much free balance she had available in multiple investment accounts," says Fred Friedrich, associate vice president and controller of financial affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. "With Cognos, the ultimate goal is to provide a single version of the truth that enables quicker, more efficient and more accurate decision-making." Before implementing Cognos, the University of Colorado spent five years trying to determine how to extract, integrate and share information culled from its various systems. In fact, an internal audit could not adequately determine if the University's department and college officers were even seeing the core financial data they would need to manage their programs effectively. Using Cognos, all information is now delivered automatically through an interface to uPortal, the sharable portal developed by the higher education community. The improved delivery and availability of information means departments are now better able to gauge their overall performance, conduct comparative analysis and even do ad-hoc reporting and querying. School administrators can now more quickly spot potential shortcomings and deficits. The Cognos solution ensures that data gets into the hands of high-level decision makers, enabling them to take immediate, corrective actions. "Despite the complexity of our organization, we now have a tool that allows us to get information to our decision makers in a timely and robust fashion," said Mary Catherine Gaisbauer, associate vice president and university controller at the University of Colorado. "That boils down to improved accountability and stronger financial performance." "Educational institutions are under considerable pressure to find innovative ways to strengthen competitive advantage and improve services they deliver to students. They can achieve these goals through the more effective use of business information locked up in their operational systems," said Terence Atkinson, director of public sector solutions at Cognos. "Cognos performance management solutions allow educational institutions at all levels to effectively leverage information to help allocate resources for maximum impact, assess and monitor performance of students, staff, and curriculum, and maintain fiscal responsibility." For more information on Cognos' successes at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Colorado, please visit the Cognos Public Sector Resource Center at http://www.cognos.com/public_sector/index.html. Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering performance management solutions for the colleges and universities industry. Over 1,000 higher education institutions worldwide use Cognos, including Southern Methodist University, The George Washington University, University of Minnesota, University of Toronto, University of Ulster (Ireland) and University of Wollongong (Australia). For more information about Cognos solutions for higher education, please visit http://www.cognos.com/solutions/industry/education/higher.html. ABOUT COGNOS: Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organization's ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? -- and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies. Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com/. DATASOURCE: Cognos CONTACT: David DeRosa of Cognos, +1-613-738-1338 ext. 3317, ; or Kristen Orfanos of Lois Paul & Partners, LLC, +1-781-782-5852, (Media Contacts); or John Lawlor of Cognos, +1-613-738-3503, (Investor Relations) Web site: http://www.cognos.com/ Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/107867.html

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