BURLINGTON, MA, August 30, 2000,—Cognos^® (Nasdaq:COGN; TSE:CSN), the world's largest and most successful business intelligence company, today enhanced the Cognos business intelligence solution with new data mart creation capabilities. The new 6.5 version of Cognos DecisionStream^TM significantly extends capabilities for creating subject-oriented data marts that form the data foundation for the Cognos technology platform and other business intelligence applications.

Cognos DecisionStream unites data from disparate sources, such as operational, e-business, and ERP systems, and provides a complete and consistent model of important business information. "Dimensional" data marts, which are information stores organized and coordinated by business- categories (i.e. customer, product, territory), can be generated and maintained with Cognos DecisionStream and integrated with the Cognos BI platform components, enabling rapid time to results. The highly flexible data marts allow fast response to the rapid-fire changes in the structure of business, such as acquisitions, mergers, consolidations, additions of product lines or shifting responsibilities of staff.

With the new release of Cognos DecisionStream, Cognos is also allowing organizations a way to effectively analyze the huge amounts of data that result from on-line transactions. Cognos DecisionStream builds an efficient end-to-end solution--from the rapid unification of disparate data sources, such as web transactions, traditional transactions, and purchased data -- to allow the efficient analysis and reporting of data mart data through Cognos BI tools.

"Cognos has a reputation for providing dimensionally friendly solutions to customers. With the announcement of Cognos DecisionStream 6.5 the industry has a solution that transforms data assets into powerful, subject-oriented data marts, but at the same time is scalable to the largest enterprise data warehouses. The result is an integrated organization, with employees accessing the same consistent views of customer, revenue, sales, inventory, production information - literally anything you wish to track - no matter where that information is resident," said Ralph Kimball, principal of Ralph Kimball Associates, North America's leading provider of dimensional data warehouse design consulting.

The latest version of Cognos DecisionStream adds powerful rules-based dimension management, adds functionality and extensibility to the transformation engine, and provides an integrated data mart task workflow designer, all designed to lower the cost of data mart creation and maintenance. Organizations can view their entire data mart environment easily, add new data marts quickly, and make changes to the entire overall structure, all at e-speed.

"With its best-practices dimensional framework, Cognos DecisionStream employs what I endorse to be an effective methodology to deploy, implement and effectively manage a data mart environment. The dimensional framework can quickly build and implement data marts with shared dimensions to form the foundation of an e-business solution, whether the data marts exist within a single organization or span a set of business partners only connected via the web. In addition, having witnessed the new Automated Dimensional Management capabilities of Cognos DecisionStream 6.5 in action, Cognos makes it possible for organizations to quickly and easily respond to changes by automating dimensional management, allowing changes to be made on the fly," added Kimball.

Eaton Corp.'s Cutler-Hammer unit, a multi- billion dollar manufacturer of power distribution and motor-control equipment, uses Cognos DecisionStream to assemble data marts for financial management, market-share analysis (domestic & international), and product/price analysis. Given the vast information requirements of the 115-year-old company with more than twenty-eight product lines and fifty manufacturing facilities, Cognos DecisionStream became the best choice for servicing Cutler-Hammer's complex requirements, according to Ray Huber, Cutler-Hammer's global sales and marketing systems manager.

"The single, coherent, unified view of key business information delivered by the Cognos products are a powerful competitive advantage. Simply knowing that our teams are all on the same page, acting on the same information is invaluable. Like so many businesses, we have to make decisions quickly, on the fly. With Cognos DecisionStream we can build data marts quickly and efficiently and along with Cognos DecisionStream's seamless integration with the other Cognos products, means that we now longer go on gut, but on key business data in a single, definitive view," adds Huber.

"With today's announcement, Cognos is aggressively reinforcing its clear leadership position with unmatched business intelligence depth. With data mart creation as the foundation of a deep technology platform for business intelligence, Cognos provides a comprehensive solution that spans the full breadth of information needs," said Joanne K. Masingill, Cognos senior vice president of marketing. "We have the solution that will take business intelligence across the entire enterprise, allowing each and every employee, supplier and partner to make better decisions, at Internet speed."

Availability
Cognos DecisionStream will be available in September 2000.