05/14/2007

Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), a specialist in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced Cognos Now!, the first offering in a new family of performance management products that will be offered exclusively as hardware appliances and through the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

ebizQ received the following:

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.

Cognos Now! is immediately interoperable with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, delivering a more complete view of enterprise information for better overall performance management.

“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 rather than several weeks or months. 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, VP and General Manager of On Demand Solutions, 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 and includes the hardware. There are three appliance editions with different processor and memory configurations to address each customer need.