BURLINGTON, MA, September 27, 2000—Cognos^® (Nasdaq:COGN; TSE:CSN), the world's largest and most successful business intelligence company, today announced support for Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services, which is part of the Microsoft .NET Platform. Microsoft .NET creates the next generation of software, which melds computing and communications in a revolutionary way.

By delivering a complete set of solutions for Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, Cognos users can easily build data marts, identify trends, access detailed information to produce or review reports, perform sophisticated analysis to develop business models and forecasts, and explore OLAP data through multi-metric visualization. Cognos business intelligence combined with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services enables organizations to gain unprecedented insight into the performance of their business and the behavior of their customers, suppliers and partners from the Web to the storefront.

"The dramatic shift among enterprises to new e-business models reflects the explosive growth in deployment of enterprise intranets and business-to-business extranets. This plays right into Cognos and Microsoft's strengths," said Bob Moran, Research Vice President and Managing Director, Decision Support Research, Aberdeen Group. "Both Cognos and Microsoft, in their different ways have demonstrated strength in these arenas. Microsoft .NET is an excellent foundation for the new generation of enterprise business intelligence solutions. Cognos and Microsoft are strongly positioned to go to market with an integrated platform for creating e-business solutions."

"Cognos' goal is to deliver valuable business intelligence and analysis to every desktop at all levels of the enterprise, securely, over the Web," said Patrick O'Leary, Cognos vice president of strategic alliances. "Microsoft .NET helps customers build a coordinated organization with best-of-breed application availability from Microsoft and Cognos, combined with low total cost of ownership, open standards and competitive advantage."

Microsoft .NET provides customers with e-business solutions that leverage the framework of technologies, services and open standards based interfaces such as OLE-DB for OLAP that are built into Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services. Cognos and Microsoft customers can perform high-impact business analysis and reporting, enhance decision-making across the enterprise, achieve competitive advantage, and rapidly build and deploy subject-area data marts that form an integrated e-business system. Cognos BI integrated with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services provides a robust production system that offers a best-in-class intelligent data warehousing solution and allows organizations to take immediate action on factors influencing their business.