Burlington, Mass., January 12, 2000—Canadian Blood Services (CBS), a national, not-for-profit organization responsible for managing the blood supply in all Canadian provinces and territories outside of Quebec, today announced that it has selected Cognos'® (Nasdaq:COGN; TSE:CSN) Enterprise Reporting Solution for e-business to help the agency track and analyze donor information across Canada. The Web-based Cognos solution will initially be used to bolster CBS donor recruiting and retention programs. This purchase is the first phase of an eventual enterprise-wide rollout of the solution over the coming year to many of the nearly 3,700 people employed by CBS.

"In Canada today, approximately 3 percent of our citizens donate blood to support a population of over 30-million. Managing and increasing our donor-base is vital to the success of our organization and the health and well being of Canadians," said Ken Anderson, chief information officer and vice-president of information services at Canadian Blood Services. "The Cognos solution brings together data from many different offices across the country and delivers it to the desktops of our employees with the real-time speed of the Web. The solution provides our staff with the vision and insight they need to leverage maximum benefit from our donor information holdings."

"We looked at other business intelligence vendors, but Cognos set itself apart with its ease-of-use and even easier implementation," said Bill Ferguson, manager of data management and marketing services at Canadian Blood Services. "Our employees see real value in the 'analyze then query' approach of the Cognos solution. To them, starting out with a high level view of the data and drilling down into the details just makes sense. That's what the Cognos Enterprise Reporting solution is all about."

A year ago, CBS had no effective and efficient way of analyzing historical donor data for the entire country. It was extremely difficult to identify which regular donors had stopped donating, where frequent donors lived, or from what demographic group they came. "Tracking down a lapsed donor was like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Mr. Anderson. "Information has no value unless it is shared. Our ultimate goal is to deploy the Cognos solution across our enterprise so that everyone from the CEO to the marketing analyst has the information and insight they need to make better decisions and do their jobs more effectively."

CBS collected all of the donor data from offices across the country and placed it into a data warehouse. The Web-based Cognos solution will serve as a primary portal to access the data warehouse and will provide employees with a range of reporting and analysis tools to meet their different information needs. For example, the visualization component enables users to view color-coded maps of Canada or specific regions of the country in order to determine which areas hold the strongest and weakest donor populations. From there, they can drill through to Cognos' multidimensional analysis or reporting tools to expose details within the donor-base that may reveal opportunities to strengthen the Canadian blood supply.

"Nowhere has the Web made a bigger impact than in the healthcare industry, where life-saving information travels to more people faster than ever before," said Tom Camps, Cognos vice president of market strategies. "Canadian Blood Services is a ground-breaking example of how this industry is adopting Cognos' Enterprise Reporting Solution for e-business to consistently leverage greater mission-critical value from their data."

About Canadian Blood Services
Canadian Blood Services is a national, not-for profit charitable organization whose sole mission is to manage the blood supply in all provinces and territories outside Quebec. CBS operates 14 blood centers, two plasma collection centers, and numerous blood donor clinics.