03/16/2004

Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the business intelligence (EBI) and corporate performance management company, debuted Cognos ReportNet 1.1. “Offering enterprise-proven performance and scalability, Cognos ReportNet 1.1 further extends leadership in enterprise reporting with all-new language support, enhanced Microsoft Office integration, and extensive support for a broad-range of data sources including robust integration with IBM and SAP BW environments,” Cognos says.

“Responding to global customer feedback, Cognos ReportNet includes all-new charting capabilities including waterfall or progressive charts as well as superior system management through extended auditing capabilities,” the vendor says. “Cognos ReportNet also demonstrates unprecedented performance and scalability. According to the results of extensive scalability tests conducted at the IBM SPC lab in San Mateo, CA, Cognos ReportNet demonstrated mission-critical performance supporting a community of 190,000 named users.”

"Cognos ReportNet is a powerful new tool to increase efficiency and help us better serve our customers. Even after only a few months in production, Cognos ReportNet, in conjunction with IBM DB2, has allowed us access to important data to enhance our ability to manage customer relationships, enabling us to streamline our product set and improve our customer service," said LaQuita Hudson, vice president of decision support at First Citizens Bank.

"First Citizens also benefits from the richness of the Cognos Enterprise BI (EBI) Series, providing quite literally a one-stop shop for BI," added Hudson.

"According to TDWI research, global organizations are increasingly looking for ways to reduce the overall total cost of ownership of managing multiple BI solutions. Thus, many organizations are looking to standardize their business intelligence infrastructure on a single integrated platform that provides functionality appropriate to all types of internal and external analytic users," said Wayne Eckerson, director of research at TDWI. "With this announcement Cognos is demonstrating that it provides a comprehensive BI solution for enterprise BI deployments that require compound reports, scorecards, dashboards or multidimensional cubes."

Features in Cognos ReportNet 1.1 include, IN COGNOS’ WORDS:

• Unprecedented Multilingual Support -- Cognos ReportNet is now immediately available in 10 languages including English, French, German Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, Finnish, Italian and Swedish all from a single server. Reports can be built once and consumed in over 25 languages.



• Enhanced Microsoft Office Integration -- Cognos ReportNet provides formatted Microsoft Excel report output, offering consistent integration with Excel including native Excel charting, formatting and multi-sheet support.



• Enterprise Platform Support -- Offering native support for SAP BW, Cognos ReportNet is one of the first enterprise applications to be certified as "Powered by SAP NetWeaver" for its integration with SAP NetWeaver, SAP's open integration and application platform. With extensive support for IBM WebSphere Internet infrastructure software, IBM WebSphere Portal software, IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner, Information Integrator, DB2 database and DB2 Cube Views for BI WebSphere, Cognos ReportNet 1.1 allows enterprises to create a single report that can draw from a wide range of heterogeneous data sources, giving business users a single view of critical business information.



• Reporting Leadership -- Cognos ReportNet covers all reporting requirements from ad hoc query, managed reports, and business reports, to bills, statements, and invoices. Cognos offers pixel-perfect, high-quality production reports to massive numbers of users. Providing enhanced report caching to minimize network impact, Cognos ReportNet also delivers seamless, single-click navigation between ad hoc queries and a professional reporting environment. Delivering unprecedented flexibility and ease of use for business users, Cognos ReportNet allows customers to create complex reports with drag-and-drop simplicity as well as superior report interactivity to easily navigate within and between multiple reports.



• Superior Metadata Intergration -- Cognos offers single relational metadata across the entire Cognos Enterprise BI series. cognos ReportNet offers a Web-based report and query authoring environment, extensive multi-lingual support and Web Services-based architecture to meet the needs of today's multi-national, diversified enterprises and to dramatically reduce total cost of ownership.

"Selected by hundreds of companies worldwide, Cognos ReportNet is the definitive standard for enterprise reporting. With today's announcement Cognos leads the market with the industry's only fully integrated, single-vendor BI solution that offers everything from flexible scorecards, dashboards, powerful industry-leading OLAP analysis, reporting, ad hoc query, event detection and alerting, and data integration," said Karen Williams, vice-president, product marketing, Cognos.