Cognos Customers Extend Performance Management Investment with Cognos 8 Planning.

-- Cognos' updated enterprise planning capabilities extend integration with business intelligence to deliver improved performance visibility and control across organizations --

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Cognos[R] (NASDAQ: COGN) (TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that customers worldwide are extending their performance management investment with Cognos 8 Planning 8.2.

Now in the deployment phase with customers, Cognos 8 Planning 8.2 extends integration with the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence platform, enabling the development of performance management solutions that fully leverage BI data, allow for shared infrastructure through a single interface and provide additional process accelerators across finance and line of business operations.

Cognos 8 Planning 8.2 shares the identical platform services and data management layer that Cognos 8 BI uses for scorecarding, reporting and analysis. This deep integration delivers a single, trusted, reliable data source that finance can easily access and IT managers can more easily manage and support.

"Cognos Planning is a critically important, strategic solution for us. With Cognos 8 Planning 8.2, we're able to build more complex applications outside the Office of Finance and across our business with a larger number of data sources," said Joel Schwalbe, CIO, CNL Financial Group. "Our business community loves the performance increases, the strengthened security and the ability to seamlessly leverage the reporting and analysis capabilities of the entire Cognos performance management platform for a standardized approach. This also gives us greater efficiencies by reducing maintenance requirements for the IT department."

Cognos 8 Planning 8.2 provides enhanced integration with third-party certified data sources such as SAP/BW. This seamless integration improves data access and management and reduces total cost of ownership for customers.

"As an SAP customer, the integration of Cognos Planning 8.2 with SAP data is something we welcome to improve data access and reporting," said David Shaw, director of financial planning and analysis, Ryerson Inc. "We appreciate the productivity improvements made in this release through elements like input validations which reduces administrator cross-checking, decreases planning cycle time and facilitates enforcement of corporate policies. The attachments feature also helps business planners and contributors easily communicate the policies and rationale for their plans and forecasts to form one shared system of record for performance."

Cognos Planning employs a distributed global administration model which helps Finance and IT avoid becoming a bottleneck to the administration of the planning process across geographies, business units and departments. Business or process owners are able to determine security rights and automate process steps such as data uploads.

"With Cognos Planning we have much smoother way to leverage existing security systems over our previous spreadsheet-based system," said Jean-Christophe Saury, financial controller, HPM, a Division of Saint-Gobain. "With sophisticated capabilities that scale to the enterprise for managing performance, trend analysis, and unified security and authentication to tightly control user access rights, we can seamlessly add new Businesses to our planning and budgeting process."

"The convergence of BI and performance management capabilities continues as customer requirements and implementation strategies require planning and budgeting capabilities, robust reporting, and data integration. Cognos has responded to these demands with the expanded capabilities of Cognos 8 Planning version 8.2," said Kathleen Wilhide, research director, GRC and BPM Solutions, IDC. "With capabilities such as increased integration of heterogeneous data sources and seamless reporting powered by Cognos 8 BI, users can achieve maximum value from the implementation of the updated Cognos Planning 8.2 solution."

Cognos Planning helps Finance departments define and link the operational drivers for a company's entire planning, budgeting and forecasting process, enables broad-based collaboration in planning across organizations, and helps managers align resource allocation decisions in response to changing market conditions quickly and with confidence. It is a core component of the Cognos 8 Performance Management Platform that enables finance to automate existing spreadsheet-based systems, establish best practices, and extend solutions to holistically model the organization, providing decision-makers with greater visibility and control of future operating performance.

"As we continue to extend our financial performance management capabilities, Cognos' rich history of innovation offers customers reliable and robust solutions that add to the breadth of the entire Cognos 8 Performance Management platform," said Doug Barton, vice president, performance management, Cognos. "We are confident organizations will continue to drive performance gains with the one solution that delivers a dramatic increase in visibility into business drivers and improved control over the levers for financial and operational performance improvement."

For additional Cognos 8 Planning 8.2 information, visit: http://www.cognos.com/products/planning_consolidation/enterprise_plan ning/planning_next_steps.html (Due to the length of this URL, it may be necessary to copy and paste it into your Internet browser's URL address field)

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.

Note to Editors: Copies of previous Cognos press releases and Corporate and product information are available on the Cognos Web site at www.cognos.com.