ORLANDO, Fla., October 15, 2007 -- Cognos® (NASDAQ: COGN) (TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that customers worldwide are successfully enabling timely, high value enterprise wide business decisions by combining Cognos’ industry-leading performance management capabilities with their SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse.

Ventana Research has found that “most companies standardize their transaction processing (accounting, inventory management and so on) within core enterprise systems such as ERP or CRM because this software handles these sorts of repetitive and often interconnected tasks well. On the other hand, corporations have shown no preference for ERP when it comes to functions involving decision support and analytics; frequently they find that alternative approaches are better for their purposes.”*

Cognos delivers dynamic and effective globally scalable reporting, ad-hoc query, analysis, dashboarding and scorecarding capabilities on top of SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Information Warehouse applications. The Cognos solution helps organizations drive more effective performance management based decision-making. Global customers who are using Cognos 8 BI to extend their SAP solutions for managing best-in-class performance include Arla Foods, Bauhaus, CheckFree Corporation, Mainova, Mölnlycke Healthcare and Nestlë:

Arla Foods is the second largest dairy company in Europe and a global supplier of dairy products for leading food producers throughout the world. The company has one of the largest production instances of SAP NetWeaver 2004 Business Information Warehouse worldwide and is using Cognos 8 BI to produce business reports for corporate reporting and timelier decision-making. One of these Cognos reports contains over 700 key metrics, making it an extremely rich and complete business overview.

“Our internal and external knowledge workers receive daily reports according to their role and access rights,” said Ulrik Hinke, BI business process manager, Arla Foods. “With Cognos, we’ve been able to gain six hours a day in the critical month-end closing period through the generation of reports in parallel, with effective email distribution and Cognos 8’s ability to support the presentation of complex information. Our employees have access to pertinent corporate data when they need it; without an ongoing reliance on specialized IT resources. The efficiency of our Cognos reporting platform helps us make effective business decisions in a very timely and efficient manner.”

BAUHAUS opened Germany’s first specialist DIY market in Mannheim in 1960. With its innovative concept BAUHAUS enabled shoppers to find everything they needed in a relaxed atmosphere under one roof. The concept proved to be a success: throughout Europe the company now employs more than 14,000 people in more than 185 outlets. With more than 28,000 m² of sales space, BAUHAUS in Düsseldorf-Gerresheim, Germany is now the largest DIY market across Europe.

“We have improved our reporting systems enormously with Cognos 8 BI. As a strategic extension to SAP BW and other data sources, Cognos 8 lets considerably more employees access important business information,” said a BAUHAUS representative. “Access is especially easy, flexible and fast. In the past, Head Office had to print individualized reports and mail them out. Now staff in the different outlets can open and analyze all the information they need in the portal. This reduces costs and our response times, which means that Cognos increases our competitiveness. Pioneers are always the first to lead – and that’s what we are with Cognos 8.”

CheckFree Corporation (Nasdaq: CKFR), is a leading provider of financial electronic commerce services and products. A Cognos BI customer for 10 years, CheckFree uses Cognos 8 BI against SAP BW data to produce detailed financial forecasting and budgeting reports across multiple cost centers.

“By using Cognos 8 BI in our SAP BW environment, we’ve been able to improve our employee usage rates through a more user-friendly, self-service reporting interface,” said Brian Davis, manager, enterprise report development, CheckFree. “Our data refresh rate has also improved from a 24-hour time period to hourly. Previously our financial analysts had to pull information from SAP and manually create reports within a spreadsheet. Now, the users can self-serve and our financial analysts are not overloaded and can focus on strategic analysis instead of manual data manipulation.”

Mainova AG is a leading German provider of electricity, heat and water. For Mainova, the rationale to invest in Cognos 8 BI on top of SAP BW stemmed from a computing environment that spanned multiple data sources and provided limited visibility to Mainova’s customer base. The sales, marketing, billing and finance departments now use analytical reports based on sales statistics that provide in-depth analysis of consumer behavior patterns in terms of revenue and consumption.

“By integrating Cognos 8 BI and SAP BW, we are efficiently addressing and managing our performance management challenges,” said Ismute Tews, Data Warehouse Project Manager, Mainova AG. “We now see customer needs directly and respond to requirements from our individual departments without delay. Cognos 8 for our BW data warehouse provides us with a proven and valuable economical advantage by delivering formatted information out of our BW system about sales markets and customer requirements as well as improving the collection of revenue and consumption data, while saving both time and money.”

Mölnlycke Health Care is one of the world’s leading providers of single-use surgical and wound care products and services to the healthcare sector. Mölnlycke selected Cognos 8 BI to provide employees with a consistent view of corporate information by combining data from its SAP and non-SAP systems across the enterprise.

“The success of our BI strategy is based on sailing on SAP BW and driving performance with Cognos 8 BI,” said Roderick Mooren, IT Director, Mölnlycke Health Care. “Through the tight integration between Cognos and SAP, we have been able to consolidate all the information from our offices worldwide which has increased overall visibility into the organization and enabled management to make more informed decisions.”

“Customer experience has shown us that building a successful performance driven enterprise tends not to be achievable with an ERP-only approach,” said Leah Macmillan, vice-president, product marketing, Cognos. “To build sustainable competitive advantage, organizations can look to the successful examples of Arla, Bauhaus, CheckFree, Mainova, and Mölnlycke Healthcare. These organizations depend on interoperability with SAP and they rely on Cognos’ proven self-service capabilities and independent, market leading performance management platform to enable expedient delivery of complete and relevant information, from both SAP and non-SAP sources."

About Cognos 8 BI on SAP:

Cognos 8 BI is built on a proven Web services-based, services-oriented architecture and certified Powered by SAP NetWeaver®. For further information on Cognos software and solutions for SAP visit: http://www.cognos.com/solutions/data/sap/business_intelligence.html

*Ventana Research, “When ERP is Not the Right Choice,” by Robert D. Kugel, October, 23, 2006. Article ID: V06-60.

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 Cognos' Web site at http://www.cognos.com.