BURLINGTON, MA, September 29, 2000—Cognos^® (Nasdaq: COGN; TSE:CSN), the world's largest and most successful business intelligence company, today announced it is the software industry's first vendor to be recognized as a 'Dimensionally Friendly' solutions provider by Ralph Kimball Associates, one of North America's leading authorities on data warehousing design.

The 'dimensional' design or ability to structure business data around consistent, business-defined categories or dimensions -- such as customer, product, territory, time period, etc. -- enables the Cognos enterprise business intelligence solution to address the fast-changing business requirements of today's organizations quickly and easily.

Cognos' enterprise business intelligence solution allows for a consistent, unified view of the data within the dimensional design, providing a powerful competitive advantage to complex global organizations where, in many cases, information is scattered and inconsistent across many departmental and divisional databases and repositories. For fast-paced e-businesses, the Cognos solution enables rapid time to results; fast deployment and implementation; and the ability to make changes to the overall business intelligence solution on the fly to respond to changes in the business.

By offering solutions that reflect the new time pressures of e-businesses, Cognos allows organizations to create a rapid-deployment business intelligence environment that can address fundamental changes in the structure of business, such as acquisitions, mergers, consolidations, additions of product lines or shifting responsibilities of staff.

The recently-announced Cognos DecisionStream 6.5 allows for the creation of highly flexible "dimensional" data marts, or information stores based on key business categories that form the highly flexible data foundation for Cognos' leading business intelligence solutions. The dimensional data marts can therefore be quickly changed or augmented to represent the changing face of the organization, allowing users to access a unified, consistent and relevant view of business information.

The 'Dimensionally Friendly' Program, launched in April 2000, was designed by Dr. Ralph Kimball, one of the data warehousing industry's leading innovators and author of best-selling books on data warehousing theory and design. Designed to educate data warehousing professionals as well as challenge data warehousing vendors, Dr. Kimball defined 20 distinct and rigorous criteria against which the components of a complete data warehouse system from the back room to the front room, can be judged for dimensional compliance.

After a rigorous evaluation, Cognos enterprise business intelligence was found to meet the criteria of 'Dimensionally Friendly' program, obtaining a high 17.4 score against the 20 exacting criteria.

"The design and implementation of dimensional friendly applications has become one of the most critical issues facing data warehousing and enterprise IT professionals. Dimensional design eliminates some of the most common and significant difficulties present in the design, implementation and maintenance of a data mart or data warehousing environment," said Dr. Ralph Kimball, president, Ralph Kimball Associates. "The dimensionally friendly Cognos enterprise business intelligence solution offers customers a solution that is adaptable, easy to administer, and capable of addressing many real-world applications challenges."

"In particular, with the announcement of Cognos DecisionStream 6.5 the industry has a solution that transforms data assets into powerful, subject-oriented data marts, but at the same time is scalable to the largest enterprise data warehouses. The result is an integrated organization, with employees accessing the same consistent views of customer, revenue, sales, inventory, production information - literally anything you wish to track - no matter where that information is resident," added Kimball.

"It is a tremendous honor to be recognized as the first vendor in the business intelligence and data warehousing marketplace to be designated as 'Dimensionally Friendly.' The specifications outlined by Dr. Kimball are comprehensive and reflect the demanding requirements of today's e-business customers. Cognos has worked extremely hard to address the real-world challenges of our global customer base and today's announcement further underlines that commitment," said Joanne K. Masingill, Cognos' senior vice president of marketing.

For more information on the 'Dimensionally Friendly' Program and Cognos' rating please visit http://www.ralphkimball.com.