Cognos builds on performance management vision

With more than 17 years of proven experience in performance management, Cognos is the only vendor to provide a single, proven software platform with key performance management capabilities including reporting and analysis, planning and forecasting, consolidation, dashboarding, and scorecarding. Whether a large or mid-sized organization, customers can track key metrics, see data and understand trends, and set and share a common view of the future.

"Six years ago, we articulated a vision enabling and engaging everyone in an organization with managing performance in a systemic way. Over the next two years, we invested in building the technology platform for performance management. And most recently, we defined the 'sweet spots' where performance management has the highest impact and offered customers pre-built solutions," said Mr. Ad Voogt, Cognos President for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, on an official visit to the United Arab Emirates.

"Our goal now is to set the market pace with a complete performance management system that enables both operational and financial performance management, underpinned with a market leading business intelligence solution," Voogt added.

New Cognos initiatives and solutions designed to accelerate performance management include:
Integration of Applix TM1 Solutions: Having teamed industry leadership in performance analytics with their expertise in performance management, Cognos is extending leadership in the financial performance management domain with integration product roadmap milestones outlined in a related announcement.

The Innovation Center On-Line Community: A customer collaboration tool available to the Cognos customer community beginning this month. The tool will provide a secure and trusted area for the Cognos innovation center members to interact with other members, thought leaders and Innovation Center experts. It will also provide an on-demand environment for members to access thought leadership articles, case studies, and business process content, share ideas and collaborate on performance management-related best practices.

Performance Manager for Life Science Book: Latest in Cognos' business book series outlines an organizational-wide performance management framework designed with information 'sweet spots' specific to Life Sciences.

Cognos will also unveil the next evolution of the company's performance management software in January featuring advances in the Cognos 8 that will give customers additional critical components required to accelerate improved business performance.

Several analysts and industry experts have sited performance management as a key to improving operations, business planning, and profits. One of Sweden's largest financial management companies, Folksam, adopted a full Cognos performance management solution in 2003. The company once spent 60% of its planning time collecting and consolidating data from SAP R/3 other system sources and business managers, and only 40% actually using the information for planning and analysis. Implementing Cognos 8 Planning as part of its performance management solution enabled Folksam to change these figures to 15% collecting and consolidating and 85% focusing on productive, future-oriented work.

Now more than 750 employees use Cognos business intelligence, planning and scorecarding capabilities on a daily basis for decision-making on market trends, scenario planning and forecasting work, calculating revenue and cost balance sheets, sales planning and risk management.

"With our performance management solution, we have a simple and quick environment that can handle all our needs and give us insight into various costs including operating costs per cost center and product, sales in relation to the budget, internal purchasing support, premiums paid and disbursed insurance sums," said George Janson, Business Intelligence Coordinator, Controller Division, Folksam.

"We've increased our reliability and reduced the time spent on operations from 66 hours to 3 hours. In the long run this means we'll save substantial time and money thanks to the Cognos solution. We're now able to focus 85% of our attention on strategic initiatives that help drive our business."

Other hallmarks of Cognos innovation and performance management leadership to-date include:

The Cognos Innovation Center:

• Since it was first launched in 2004 to build a community of like-minded, forward- thinking individuals in finance and IT focused on improving planning and PM practices within their organizations, the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management:
• Now boasts more than 3,000 members representing over 500 organizations made up of Cognos customers and partners.
• Has released more than 30 industry and functional Performance Blueprints which are pre-built planning templates to help customers jump-start their deployment to achieve rapid time-to-value while minimizing risk.

Partnership Strength

• Cognos' performance management leadership is also supported and extended by a strong partner network, including technology partners, value added resellers, OEMs, more than 70 Powered by Cognos Solutions and global strategic alliances featuring industry leaders including IBM, Accenture, and Deloitte, with whom Cognos announced considerable customer momentum today.

Thought Leadership Authoring:
• The Cognos Performance Manager book has a broad readership with 30,000 copies distributed, and has been translated into nine languages since its first publication in January 2007. A second edition of the book is slated for release in early 2008.

Industry Recognition:

• Completeness of vision and ability to execute have consistently positioned Cognos in the "leaders' quadrant" of the Gartner Magic Quadrants* for Corporate Performance Management Suites for Business Intelligence Platforms.
• Cognos and Cognos customers continue to received numerous awards in recognition of their commitment to performance management excellence including the 2007 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the Ventana Research Performance Management Leadership Award the InformationWeek 500 and induction into the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame.