Cognos Now! Operational BI Solution First To Be Delivered As Hardware Appliance And SaaS


– Offers fast, low-cost deployment for enterprise departments or mid-size organizations –


ORLANDO, FL, May 14, 2007 (COGNOS FORUM)– Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced Cognos Now!, the first offering in a new family of BI and performance management solutions that will be offered exclusively as hardware appliances and through the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Cognos Now! is an innovative solution that offers self-service dashboards, integrated data, analysis and reports as a prepackaged BI appliance or as a hosted service. Cognos Now! allows customers to easily deploy and maintain a complete, operational BI solution at a low cost, even when IT staff or resources are limited.

Based on technology from the recent Celequest acquisition, Cognos Now! is the industry’s first BI appliance. The product is also offered as Cognos Now! for Salesforce for customers who need to monitor performance against their Salesforce data. With interactive, self-service operational dashboards and real-time information monitoring, Cognos Now! allows enterprise departments and small to mid-size companies to proactively track, monitor and respond to critical data immediately. With continuously up-to-date business visibility, customers can improve the management of day-to-day organizational activities and increase operational efficiency. Cognos Now! is particularly beneficial to small and mid-market companies that often lack the IT resources and budget to install, deploy and maintain software solutions.

Operational BI solutions deployed on Cognos Now! appliances are immediately interoperable with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, delivering a complete view of enterprise information and further extending the value of the Cognos performance management framework.

“As manager of one of the world’s largest energy markets, the Midwest ISO deals with a huge volume of data,” said Anushree Bag, manager of performance assurance with Midwest ISO. “Cognos Now! enables us to better track, analyze and instantly react to changing conditions, all in a complete BI solution that was more economical than other products."

Cognos Now! is a complete BI offering packaged in a single hardware appliance that can be installed in less than an hour. Cognos Now! includes the preconfigured hardware server, the BI application and all other necessary software for a fixed price regardless of the number of users, dashboards or data sources. The solution’s self-service dashboards enable business users across an organization to personalize and change views without any additional training or IT involvement. With a scalable architecture, Cognos Now! can support vast numbers of users, data sources and dashboards on a single appliance requiring minimal maintenance.

“Our vision is to help our customers drive business performance and Cognos Now! is an exciting offering that will help our customers achieve even greater success,” said Diaz Nesamoney, vice president and general manager of on-demand solutions at Cognos. “Companies of all sizes need to be aware of and able to respond to changing business conditions in order to succeed. With Cognos Now!, we are able to offer robust, operational BI solutions that allow more companies to easily and cost-effectively harness the value hidden in their business data.”

Cognos Now! is available immediately as a hardware appliance or hosted service. There are three appliance editions – SMB, Standard, and Enterprise -- with different processor and memory configurations to address a range of customer performance and scale requirements.

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 http://www.cognos.com.