- Global Strategic Alliance strengthens integration, lowering total cost of ownership and increasing visibility and insight into organizational performance - ANAHEIM, Calif., Oct. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- At IBM Information On Demand 2006, Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), a world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that Cognos and IBM customers worldwide are gaining greater insight into business performance through tighter product integration. Building on its Global Strategic Alliance and long-term relationship with IBM, Cognos and IBM continue to focus on helping customers succeed with optimized business intelligence products for IBM. "The strength of the Cognos and IBM relationship helps IBM clients improve performance, lower costs, and capitalize on their IBM hardware, middleware, and software investments," said Pete Fiore, vice president, IBM Information Integration Solutions. "Our global strategic alliance delivers powerful solutions with flexibility, functionality, and ease of use. This relationship also furthers the goal of providing an on-demand real-time BI environment -- one that delivers information when it is needed, and in the format that best suits that need." Cognos and IBM joint customers are seeing increased integration between Cognos performance management solutions and IBM middleware technologies. As a result, customers are gaining greater visibility into their business operations and performance by reaching more information at a deeper level. This gives organizations, such as ACOSS, Canadian Tire, City of Albuquerque, Clarins, Department for Work & Pensions (UK), Dubai Municipality, ELM Resources, Fiskars Brands, Inc., Gordon Trucking, Harry-Brot, MessageLabs, Nova Scotia Department of Health, and University of Wollongong, a more complete picture of business data and enables them to more confidently drive the business. "Cognos allows us to give our users the power to select meaningful metrics specific to measuring individual performance," said Pierre Vedel, senior vice president/CIO of ELM Resources. "In addition, Cognos ensures interoperability with our existing IT environment, helping us increase ROI with other technologies such as IBM Websphere Portal solutions. As a result, we can help financial aid offices at colleges and universities across the U.S. get the specific information they need to better manage the student loan process." "Cognos allows us to put information in the hands of our users to help them make better business decisions about products, marketing, and operations," said Francois Boiteux, director of organization and information systems, Clarins. "We can see a high level view of information down to a detailed level of specific metrics, using IBM's Datastage (formerly Ascential) to pull from a variety of data sources, including IBM DB2 400. As we continue to expand our deployment, we are glad to have the support of both IBM and Cognos." "With Cognos, our professionals across marketing, finance, sales, operations, and other key departments can now confidently act on information rather than spending time trying to locate it," said Carl Try Jr., manager of eCommerce and Advanced Technologies, at Fiskars Brands, Inc. "Central to the decision to implement Cognos was the Cognos strategic partnership and close working relationship with IBM and JD Edwards. The fact that they integrate so seamlessly is a huge benefit to our organization. Moving forward, we plan to use Cognos and IBM to power our vendor and customer extranets, further strengthening our relationships with those two audiences." "Our strategic partnership with IBM continues to drive business value throughout our customers' extended enterprises," said Dave Laverty, chief marketing officer and senior vice president, Cognos. "We've made great progress executing our Global Strategic Alliance, and our joint customers are seeing great value resulting from tighter alignment from our organizations. Combining Cognos 8 BI's one-product, one architecture vision with the strength of IBM hardware, software, and services delivers a powerful infrastructure for making better business decisions." Cognos is a diamond sponsor of IBM Information On Demand 2006 this week in Anaheim, Calif., exhibiting at Booth D501. For more information on Cognos and IBM joint solutions, visit http://www.cognos.com/solutions/data/ibm/index.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/. Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Media Contacts: Amy Shanler Cognos, Inc., 781-313-2464 Jolene Bonina Lois Paul & Partners, LLC, 781-782-5849 Investor Relations: John Lawlor Cognos, Inc., 613-738-3503 DATASOURCE: Cognos CONTACT: Media: Amy Shanler of Cognos, Inc., +1-781-313-2464, ; or Jolene Bonina of Lois Paul & Partners, LLC, +1-781-782-5849, ; or Investor Relations: John Lawlor of Cognos, Inc., +1-613-738-3503, Web site: http://www.cognos.com/ Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/107867.html

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