BURLINGTON, MA, May 25, 2000—Cognos^® (NASDAQ:COGN; TSE:CSN) today further expanded its longstanding relationship with Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPW) by announcing the immediate availability of the latest versions of the Cognos PowerHouse® family of high-productivity application development tools for the Internet-ready HP e3000 business servers. With thousands of customers around the world, Cognos continues to enhance its popular application development toolset.

PowerHouse Web 2.29 is the premier HP e3000 release of the latest addition to the PowerHouse family that delivers reliable and scalable Web-based applications by harnessing the high-productivity development and native data access capabilities of PowerHouse 4GL.

Also immediately available are both PowerHouse 4GL 8.29 - the latest version of this popular server-based application development environment for the HP e3000, enhanced with numerous Web-specific application development capabilities - and Axiant® 4GL 3.0, the latest version of Cognos’ Windows-based integrated development environment (IDE) for PowerHouse. Axiant 4GL enables Web, Windows and terminal-based PowerHouse applications to be built in an intuitive graphical environment, and then deployed to any of the supported PowerHouse 4GL or PowerHouse Web platforms. Axiant 4GL 3.0 fully supports the Web enhancements made to the latest version of PowerHouse 4GL, as well as providing extensive advice and automated assistance to PowerHouse customers looking to move existing terminal-based PowerHouse applications into new environments.

"This announcement further strengthens our long-term relationship with Cognos," said Winston Prather, general manager of HP’s Commercial Systems Division. "The developer productivity delivered by the Cognos PowerHouse tools will greatly enhance our HP e3000 customers’ ability to quickly deliver sophisticated, core business applications that are easily accessible through either a Web browser or on the Windows desktop. The Cognos tools are an ideal complement to HP’s reliable and highly scaleable Internet-ready HP e3000 business servers."

"Cognos and HP have provided the best of both worlds - fast, reliable, mature, and scalable software with the hardware to match," said Blair Combs, Manager of Administrative Systems, Idaho State University. "Now, just as HP focuses its efforts by adding robust ’e’ capabilities to the HP e3000, Cognos steps up to deliver their sought-after PowerHouse Web solution for the MPE/iX operating system - utilizing the same mature programming language we have come to depend on for more than 15 years."

Ed Shepherdson, director, Application Development Tools, Cognos, adds "In delivering our new PowerHouse tools to the HP e3000 market, Cognos continues to fulfill its promise to protect our customers’ investments in applications and developer skills, while at the same time offering the ability to adopt new environments and technologies at their own pace."

Cognos PowerHouse
The Cognos PowerHouse family of high-productivity application development tools consists of PowerHouse 4GL, Axiant 4GL and PowerHouse Web. PowerHouse 4GL is a server-based application development environment that enables line-of-business application solutions to be built quickly and modified easily, often delivering developer productivity improvements of up to 90% when compared with traditional tools such as COBOL, BASIC, C, C++ and Java. Axiant 4GL provides a visual integrated development environment (IDE) for building Web, Windows and terminal-based PowerHouse applications for deployment in a variety of flexible and scalable Web-based, client/server (thin-client and fat-client), server-based and mobile or standalone topologies. Using Axiant 4GL developers benefit from the same productivity improvements available with PowerHouse 4GL but work in a powerful, object- based, Windows environment.

PowerHouse Web is the newest addition to the PowerHouse family. It enables PowerHouse application screens to be deployed for access through a standard Web browser - so enabling the renowned developer productivity of both PowerHouse 4GL and Axiant 4GL to now be used to deliver Web applications on any of the supported PowerHouse Web platforms. And through a flexible request distribution and dynamic load balancing architecture, PowerHouse Web enables efficient deployment of Web-applications in heterogeneous server environments.

Details of the Cognos application development solution for the HP e3000 can be found on the Cognos Web site at http://www.Cognos.com/hp3000. Cognos is a member of the HP Computing Solution Provider Program. The Cognos PowerHouse family of products is also available for HP-UX and Microsoft Windows ® NT/2000.