Burlington, MA, July 19, 2000—Cognos^® (Nasdaq:COGN; TSE:CSN), the world’s largest and most successful business intelligence company, today announced Cognos Finance 5.0, delivering integrated budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, financial reporting and analysis into one comprehensive and easy-to-use system. Cognos Finance provides a unified and global view of financial information with the industry’s most complete Web reporting and budgeting capabilities.

Cognos Finance is tailored to both financial professionals who require sophisticated manipulation of financial data and non-financial professionals requiring Web-based access to financial analysis and budgeting. Cognos Finance provides entire organizations with critical financial data by pulling information out of disparate sources and rapidly consolidating it to align business strategies, actual results, budgets, and operational plans quickly and efficiently, as well as allow sophisticated analysis of organizations’ business performance.

Financial professionals can also define any business model and support the requirements of national and multi-national companies to management, statutory and regulatory financial statements. Flexibility allows for rapid support of ad-hoc requests such as evaluating acquisitions and company restructuring.

"Cognos Finance has literally slashed the time it takes to consolidate our financial data in half. We are now getting access to more information in less time across 22 geographically distributed divisions and subsidiaries across North America. The productivity gains are significant," said Art Lorenz, director of planning and analysis, Hunter Douglas Inc., a world market leader in home décor products based in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

"Enterprises that have the wherewithal to immediately derive the answers to critical questions like ’how is my business doing?’ will be the survivors in emerging e-business battles. Cognos Finance allows enterprises to rapidly pool key financial data, especially critical for complex, geographically dispersed companies where the necessary data and the answers aren’t under one roof," said Bob Moran, research, vice-president, managing director, Decision Support Research, Aberdeen Group.

"Cognos Finance 5.0 meets growing customer requirements for an integrated consolidation and budgeting application providing both the financial and non-financial community with Web-based financial reporting and budgeting," said Alan Rottenberg, Cognos senior vice president of e-business intelligence applications.

Cognos Finance can be accessed directly by Cognos PowerPlay®, giving users the sophisticated analysis of the industry’s number one business intelligence tool. The Cognos Finance solution can also be used in conjunction with Cognos Visualizer, providing graphical business visualizations for delivering information to senior management.

Consolidated results are processed and stored within a central repository along with history and multiple versions of budgets and forecasts. Rich budgeting features that include command and control and integrated human resource budgeting provide the ability to input information across the organization. Users can easily review and manipulate financial and management reports such as comparative variance and key ratio reports. Budgets and reports are distributed quickly and easily across the enterprise over the LAN or the Web, on secure Intranets or Extranets, ensuring rapid access to key financial information.

With Cognos Finance 5.0 businesses can:

• Integrate budgeting, forecasting, consolidation and financial reporting and analysis into one comprehensive and easy-to-use system;

• Improve the speed to result by efficiently streamlining monthly and quarterly closings and coordinate and gather data from all subsidiaries and general ledgers;

• Substantially improve the speed to result by offering the fastest speed to implementation and lowest cost of ongoing maintenance;

• Use the Web to distribute and gather budgets, forecasts and reports across the enterprise.

Availability
Cognos Finance 5.0 will be available within 90 days, sold directly and through Cognos’ solutions providers and OEMs.