BURLINGTON, MA, July 30, 2001—Cognos^® (Nasdaq: COGN ; TSE: CSN), the leading provider of business intelligence solutions, today announced Cognos Finance 5.1, the industry's most complete solution for budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and reporting. Delivering fully integrated financial reporting and analysis, the Web-based financial solution powerfully extends the capabilities of Cognos Finance, giving organizations unprecedented insight to their financial health and performance.

Available immediately, Cognos Finance 5.1 provides today's organizations with a unique, integrated environment for accelerating financial processes—from rapid monthly and quarterly closes, facilitating corporate budgeting processes, to integrating up-to-date results with forecasts from the field. Cognos Finance customers can create an accurate view of the financial information, and then share that information over a secure Web-based environment.

One of Fortune's100 fastest growing companies and a leading homebuilding firm in the United States, Standard Pacific Homes (NYSE:SPF) chose Cognos Finance in 1999. Standard Pacific Homes uses Cognos Finance to streamline, standardize, and speed up its financial processes. Actual results and certain budget information is downloaded and automatically consolidated, delivering standardized, easy-to-read reports to decision-makers in record time.

"With Cognos Finance, the CEO and CFO are able to access aggregated financial information at the end of the quarter almost a week sooner than was previously possible. As a result, there is more time for budget review and critical business decisions that are made using the most accurate, up-to-date information," said Bruce Torkelson, Assistant Land Development Controller, Standard Pacific Homes. "This real-time access to financial information even allows the company to review our division's updated margins for each housing project, along with a preliminary operating budget, before the end of the quarter."

Standard Pacific Homes' 11 locations in the U.S. operate as individual business units. The company's financial processes before the adoption of Cognos Finance were long and arduous, requiring the consolidation of countless Excel files.

The new enterprise financial solution further extends the Web-based functionality of Cognos Finance, enabling financial departments to reach even more users. Reflecting the changing nature of organizations, the zero footprint Web solution lets financial professionals create detailed financial performance reports for the entire organization that are easy to maintain and distribute.

"Today's global enterprises face a turbulent environment for forecasting income and expenses, and budgeting various operations," said Henry Morris, VP for Applications and Information Access at International Data Corp. (IDC). "Financial analytic applications are designed to support these business processes. Cognos Finance 5.1 provides budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and reporting built on a single integrated data store, helping to shorten the total time required to accomplish these critical tasks."

Cognos Finance 5.1 gives all budget stakeholders access to a structured, graphical environment, ensuring effective, 'single view' management of the budgeting process. Managers tasked with supplying budgets from the field have access to all-new, standardized tools for even faster and more accurate budget creation, including integrated employee budgeting that allows budgeting by individual employee. In addition, powerful exception analysis capabilities are built directly into reports, giving decision-makers the ability to drill-through to granular levels of detail, as well as easy navigation through their entire financial model.

Headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, Murray, Inc. is an industry-leading supplier of lawn tractors, walk-behind mowers and recreational vehicles. With a highly diversified product set, Murray products are distributed through 1,000s of retail outlets selling across the U.S. and internationally. Murray, Inc. looked for an integrated solution that delivered enterprise-class financial reporting. Today, the manufacturer is using Cognos Finance 5.1.

"Cognos continues to make significant enhancements to the product and we are very impressed by the new functionality of Cognos Finance 5.1. Cognos Finance offers us a powerful, Web-based solution that will enable our financial professionals to create accurate, timely financial reports and put financial performance information into the hands of our decision-makers. Importantly, the speed with which we have financial information ensures even better strategic decision making as an organization," said Rose Melillo, financial systems analyst, Murray, Inc.

New Cognos Finance 5.1 features include:

• Integrated Employee Budgeting—Cognos Finance lets users manage staff changes by individual or group, assign raises and bonuses, change effective dates for increases, start dates for new hires, etc.

• User-Defined Calculations—Users can add greater detail into a budget including creating their own input accounts, calculations and formulas in notations

• Web-based data entry—Users can access budget information and input their contributions from a simple Web browser as well as perform sophisticated functions such as data extrapolation, and spreading a single number into the rows based on existing or standard trends

• Workflow management—All budgeting stakeholders can participate through the Web via managed, structured workflow processes to insure budgets are opened, monitored and closed on time.

"Cognos is empowering financial professionals—with an integrated financial environment that addresses their unique requirements. Cognos Finance gives customer deep insight into what is effectively the heart of the enterprise—the financial data," said Alan Rottenberg, senior vice president, E-Business Intelligence Applications Unit. "Against today's economic backdrop, organizations are putting a premium on rapid access to their financial performance. With accelerated access to accurate financial data, organizations can better respond to market conditions and competitive pressures."

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