Burlington, MA, July 18, 2000—DealTime, ITXC Corp. (Nasdaq:ITXC) and The Credit Store have leveraged the combined power of Cognos^® (Nasdaq:COGN; TSE:CSN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) to enhance decision-making across the enterprise, drive enterprise-wide performance and better understand their customers. These companies have selected the Cognos enterprise business intelligence solution and Microsoft SQL Server OLAP Services to enhance their e-business processes and run their businesses more effectively, efficiently, and at a lower cost. Cognos is the world’s largest and most successful business intelligence company.

Cognos’ true end-to-end BI solutions let companies of any size fully leverage the power of Microsoft’s SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server OLAP Services. By delivering a complete set of solutions for the Microsoft data warehousing platform, Cognos users can easily build data marts, identify trends, access detailed information to produce or review reports, perform sophisticated analysis to develop business models and forecasts, and explore OLAP data through multi-metric visualization. Cognos BI, together with OLAP Services, provides a robust production system that offers a best-in-class intelligent data warehousing solution.

Cognos works closely with its direct sales force and extensive global partner network to supply and implement business intelligence solutions for joint Cognos and Microsoft customers. The following customers have recently purchased Cognos’ enterprise BI solutions and integrated them with Microsoft SQL Server OLAP Services:

DealTime (www.dealtime.com)
DealTime, the world’s leading online comparison shopping service, is a gateway to a rich information exchange between consumers who are ready to buy and merchants who want to sell a wide variety of consumer goods and services.

"By choosing Cognos, DealTime can simplify the complexity and improve the effectiveness of our business intelligence solution," said Ted Silverman, vice president of retention and metrics at DealTime. "Cognos will assist us in gaining valuable insight into our customer base which will allow DealTime to make better business decisions and develop a more robust customer retention strategy."

Cognos business partner, Pinnacle Decision Systems, headquartered in Middletown, Connecticut, implemented the Cognos solution deployed at DealTime.

ITXC Corp. (www.itxc.com)
ITXC Corp. is the service providers’ service provider and operates ITXC.net, the world’s largest Internet telephony network with 258 IP PoPs in 151 cities in 60 countries.

"As the Internet telephony market has matured, ITXC has seen a serious need for analytic applications such as Cognos’ business intelligence solution and SQL Server OLAP Services," said Lee Cascio, director of development at ITXC Corp. "Our clients work in Internet time and ITXC needs to have our internal solutions up and running very quickly so we can get results to our customers. We selected Cognos and SQL Server OLAP Services because they are easy-to-use, packaged applications that can digest our data, analyze and report on all facets of our business, and allow us to provide incredible customer service to our clients."

Cognos business partner, Weidenhammer Systems Corp., based in East Petersburg, Pennsylvania, is implementing the Cognos solution at ITXC.

The Credit Store (www.creditstore.com)
The Credit Store, Inc. is a technology-based, financial services company that provides credit card products to consumers who may otherwise fail to qualify for a traditional unsecured bank credit card.

"Using Cognos and SQL Server OLAP Services to analyze and stratify critical data allows our business units to evaluate portfolios faster and more accurately than the competition. This gives us a clear advantage in the competitive financial services marketplace," said William Buriak, The Credit Store’s chief information officer. "Cognos has helped make our business processes more efficient, and allowed us to take full advantage of our investment in Microsoft technology. It’s been a dynamite combination."

Cognos Premier Partner, Insightformation Inc., based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, implemented the Cognos solution deployed at The Credit Store.

Cognos’ BI solutions can be deployed across the entire enterprise, and provide complete, manageable solutions for users across Windows clients, servers, and zero footprint OLAP Web client. Cognos fully supports Microsoft technologies and standards, such as OLE DB, OLE DB for OLAP, MDX, Digital Dashboard, Windows 2000, SQL Server, Excel, Office and IIS.

"Microsoft is taking business intelligence to a broader market, making OLAP a mainstream technology. Our relationship with Cognos helps expand the reach of business intelligence on the Microsoft platform to a broader audience," said Steve Murchie, SQL Server group product manager at Microsoft. "Cognos business intelligence offerings provide our SQL Server OLAP Services customers with a depth and breadth of reporting and analysis solutions that harness the power of SQL Server."

"Cognos’ enterprise business intelligence solutions integrated with Microsoft’s SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server OLAP Services provide the most complete, end-to-end BI solution for our mutual customers," said Patrick O’Leary, Cognos vice president of strategic alliances. "Cognos’ unique zero-footprint Web deployment allows customers to quickly deploy powerful BI solutions to thousands of individuals across their extended enterprise without the complexity and slow response times associated with plug-in or applet-based methods."