Cognos Launches Cognos 8 BI v3 Worldwide

--Major update to BI flagship product delivers more targeted
information to a broader range of user roles with extended platform
capabilities simplifying deployment and administration--
NEW YORK--(Business Wire)--Cognos(R) (NASDAQ: COGN) (TSX: CSN), the world leader in business
intelligence and performance management solutions, today launched
Cognos 8 BI v3 which includes new and enhanced BI user capabilities
and advances in its SOA-based enterprise-class platform. These new
developments are designed to efficiently provide organizations with
more targeted performance information across a broader and more
diverse range of decision-makers, with extended modeling and
administration capabilities to simplify deployment and maintenance for
administrators.

According to the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.'s latest IT Spending
Survey, the business intelligence software category "remains a top
priority among our respondents for the upcoming 12 months. It is a
testament to the fact that enterprises, through increasing adoption of
enterprise resource planning tools, have accumulated vast amounts of
data and are now looking for tools to enable them to improve their
decision-making processes on the basis of that data."*

Cognos 8 BI v3 is the third major release of Cognos' business
intelligence flagship that was introduced in 2005. It addresses the
needs of large enterprises and mid-market organizations alike as they
capitalize on their ERP investments and turn data into actionable,
relevant performance information for improved decision-making across
industries. New highly targeted information delivery and improved
analysis capabilities let knowledge workers, ranging from front-line
managers to executives, receive strategic business information where,
when and how they need it to make better decisions. New deployment and
administration advances also make it easier for IT administrators to
deploy and manage their performance management environment, while
growing their user communities.

"Cognos 8 BI v3 is a rich product offering with strong benefits
for business users who can now take advantage of statement-style
reporting, improved navigation, richer visualization and
business-friendly tools for building OLAP cubes," said Chad Erman,
Business Intelligence Lead, Southwestern Energy Company. "Features
like briefing books, flexible information organization and enhanced
dashboard filtering help refine the style and quality of integral BI
information that is delivered to key individuals, departments and
business partners. With this product, both midsize organizations and
large enterprises should be able to increase the value and relevance
of their BI information across all levels and functions of the
organization."

The new user capabilities of Cognos 8 BI v3 that deliver more
targeted information to more user communities include:

-- Express Authoring Mode: Provides a self-service, streamlined,
purpose-built reporting interface for finance and business
analysts to access financial and operational data sources and
create financial, statement style reports. Optimized to
support cross tabulations, Express Authoring gives these users
the simplified environment required to easily create and
publish these reports using consistent information from their
enterprise BI platform.

-- Business Driven Modeling with New Transformer Capabilities:
Provides business groups with the ability to easily create and
manage their own perspectives of performance information by
creating new OLAP cubes with the consistent information in
their enterprise BI platform. Business analysts, for example,
can use Cognos 8 BI to construct smaller, faster data sets of
very specific, relevant line of business performance
information for more targeted exploration, analysis and faster
decision-making. This capability satisfies the unique
requirements of line of business workers while leveraging
existing IT investments and retaining IT oversight on all user
community information.

-- Scorecard Portlets: Through Cognos Connection, the BI
portal-based dashboard, business users and executives can now
save time by accessing all of their organization's relevant
strategy management, scorecard information and diagrams in one
comprehensive, at-a-glance view. This capability helps
organizations efficiently provide more visibility into company
strategy to ensure cross-functional alignment through
execution.

-- Briefing Books: Briefing books help busy IT administrators or
line of business users address special requests from senior
management for a comprehensive view of performance
information. Professional authors can combine different styles
and formats within a single report, making it easy for
executives to navigate and print multi-style, multi-page
reports that contain related, critical business information.

-- Self-service Personal Alerts: Business users can create their
own timely personalized alerts for scheduled reports,
controlling when and how they receive critical performance
information relevant to their specific area of responsibility.
This capability personalizes and streamlines the reporting
experience for end users and frees IT from having to deliver
specialized reports on demand.

Core Platform Advances

Underpinning this broad set of BI user capabilities are core
advances in the Cognos 8 open, enterprise-class platform. Proven best
practices are built directly into the modeling environment, helping
data modelers more efficiently deliver performance information to the
business. As well, the central, web-based administration capabilities
now provide a more holistic view of the overall system activities and
their status, enabling Cognos 8 BI administrators to more easily and
proactively manage and maintain their deployments. With a
metrics-driven management approach, administrators can meet their
business Service Level Agreements, as their user communities grow.

"The broad system management advances we've tested in Cognos'
enterprise platform help us speed development and overall productivity
to achieve and exceed service commitments," said Thomas Haag, Project
Manager Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence, Lufthansa. "The
administrative enhancements let our operations team proactively
monitor the overall system health in real time, easing repetitive
questions and speeding decisions, on peak usage days in particular."

New components of the Cognos 8 enterprise-class platform that ease
deployment and management include:

-- Model Advisor: Lets novice or advanced data modelers reduce
the time and effort required to build high-quality models for
delivering timely information to the business. They can
leverage Cognos modeling best-practices to guide the model
development from initial design or diagnose issues in the
model where improvements can be made.

-- Snapshot of System Health: A key enterprise management
capability that gives administrators a single, consolidated
view into all the information they need to quickly understand
the status of the entire system environment. They can address
potential problem areas before they become issues for end
users and easily monitor all BI deployments to quickly obtain
status of all servers, server groups, dispatchers, and
services. Metrics can also be exposed to systems such as IBM
Tivoli to tie into overall enterprise application monitoring
activities.

-- Proactive Administration: Administrators can now view any
number of system metrics and set thresholds to monitor them.
With the thresholds, administrators can be alerted when a
metric is starting to trend down or up and requires attention.
These capabilities ease the burden on administrators as
deployments scale and system complexity increases, ensuring
they are able to exceed service level agreements with the
business by addressing issues before they impact users.
Priority can be given to critical processes to ensure
consistent service delivery.

-- Upgrade Manager: This feature helps IT administrators improve
responsiveness to the business by streamlining the process of
introducing technology changes such as upgrades or system
changes. It provides the means to test, compare and summarize
report results between two parallel environments. This reduces
the cost and effort associated with upgrading to new
capabilities or switching to the latest version of a database.

"These key advancements will help organizations see a greater
return on their BI investments, especially as they expand their
community of Cognos BI users," said Leah MacMillan, vice-president,
product marketing, Cognos, Inc. "Customers will be able to improve
overall business performance by enabling diverse users- from
front-line business personnel to financial analysts to executives - to
receive personalized, relevant information where, when and how they
need it. Users across the organization can make better, more informed
decisions, and IT can more easily deploy and manage their BI
solutions."

For a more detailed summary of what is new in Cognos 8 BI v3 visit
specific issue papers on delivering targeted information, supporting
more user communities and deployment and management.

Availability:

Cognos 8 BI v3 is available today direct from Cognos or its
network of resellers worldwide.

*The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Independent Insight/US Technology
Strategy, IT Spending Survey, October 10, 2007, Laura Conigliaro,
Sarah Friar, Derek Bingham.

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

Media:
Cognos, Inc.
Carrie Bendzsa, 613-738-1440
Carrie.bendzsa@cognos.com
or
Lois Paul & Partners, LLC
Jolene Hajj, 781-782-5849
jolene_hajj@lpp.com
or
Investor Relations:
Cognos, Inc.
John Lawlor, 613-738-3503
john.lawlor@cognos.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008