TDWI Winter, Booth 408, Las Vegas, February 19, 2008 -– Cognos, an IBM company, and the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions , today announced that Minneapolis-based Great Clips has selected IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) as its standard to streamline operational reporting and analysis.

With over 2600 locations, Great Clips is the largest franchised salon brand in North America. The company wanted to better support salon operations by automating its reporting and analysis processes and providing business users with increased access to performance information through self-service capabilities. This will give the chain better visibility into salon performance, franchise operations, location openings, promotion effectiveness, business trends and its customer base.

To streamline these efforts, Great Clips conducted a comprehensive competitive review to find a BI solution with robust enterprise reporting capabilities that were easy to use and maintain. IBM Cognos 8 BI was selected to integrate with Great Clips’ Microsoft environment and seamlessly pull data from a number of disparate sources including the company’s financial, human resources, franchise, legal, and Point of Sale (PoS) systems.

“Our strategy is to purchase flexible, best-in-class applications that require minimal maintenance deploy quickly and give managers easy-to-use ‘self-serve’ capabilities,” said Kathy Wetzel, Vice-President, IT, Great Clips. “With Cognos we can reduce reporting and analysis efforts and improve data consistency and accuracy, which will give our operations and franchising managers the insight needed to make better decisions. We expect to see a rapid payback on our investment simply from freeing our business users from manual analysis.”

“Retailers of all sizes need powerful, proven and user-friendly BI solutions for real-time visibility into business performance,” said Patricia Vekich Waldron, global retail industry director, Cognos. “In partnership with Cognos, Great Clips can harness the power of their existing systems to get a complete view of performance across the organization so they can optimize their business by improving salon operations, managing margins and enhancing their brand.”

Cognos also is working with Great Clips on the implementation of the BI solution.

Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering performance management solutions for the retail industry. In fact, 36 per cent of the world's top 250 retailers, and over 300 retail chains worldwide, use Cognos solutions. In addition to Great Clips, Cognos retail customers include Steak N Shake, Burlington Coat Factory, Amazon.com, American Eagle Outfitters, LVMH Perfumes & Cosmetics, and 7-Eleven. For more information about Cognos solutions for retail, please visit http://www.cognos.com/solutions/industry/retail/index.html.

About IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Products:

IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) delivers easy-to-use BI with the right context, through familiar interfaces, at the right time. For further information visit: http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/index.html

About Great Clips:

Great Clips was established in 1982 in Minneapolis. Over the past twenty-five years, the company has grown from four salons – the first of which sprouted on the University of Minnesota campus – to more than 2600 locations across the United States and Canada. Great Clips salons employ nearly 30,000 stylists who receive ongoing training to learn advanced skills and the latest trends. For further information see: http://www.greatclips.com/index.html

About Cognos, an IBM company

Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions. It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008. For more information visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com.

Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated, an IBM Company, 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 the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.