Burlington, MA, November 12, 2001—Cognos^® (Nasdaq: COGN; TSE: CSN), the leading global provider of business intelligence solutions, today announced Cognos NoticeCast, a solution that monitors business transactions and events as they occur and provides broad-based wireless alerting.

Cognos NoticeCast is tightly integrated with Cognos Series 7 and provides organizations with a way to monitor and alert on information in business intelligence, transactional or operational systems such as ERP, supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), or any relational data store. Designed for use by business and technical users alike, Cognos NoticeCast notifies and alerts decision makers, just in time, to issues with customer relationships, supply chain activity, sales and financial performance, or any other business event.

"As companies deploy business intelligence capabilities on an enterprise scale, they need to deliver critical business information in the form of alerts, exceptions, and drillable reports to increasingly mobile users across a variety of channels, including the Web, personal digital assistants, pagers, wireless phones, and so on," said Wayne Eckerson, director of education and research at The Data Warehousing Institute. "Cognos Series 7 provides a business intelligence framework that lays the foundation for companies to manage overall business performance management from the bottom up."

Sending only the personalized information relevant to an individual or group, Cognos NoticeCast narrowcasts critical business intelligence reports or analysis as well up-to-the-minute operational event information to users via e-mail, digital cell phone, or personal digital assistant (PDA).

TUI is a member company of Preussag AG, the world leader in the global tourism market which covers over 80 per cent of the European market with 3,658 travel agencies, 75 tour operators and brands, 88 aircraft, 49 incoming agencies and 270 hotels. TUI InfoTec is the IT service provider for the tourism division of Preussag AG. A complex business that spans airline, hotel, and travel agencies, TUI needed a means to provide its users with up-to-the-minute information about its business performance.

"For an organization like TUI where information is incredibly time-sensitive, Cognos NoticeCast will deliver significant benefits to our user community," said Michael Cares, head of business intelligence systems support, TUI InfoTec.

For example, using a unique dynamic addressing feature, Cognos NoticeCast offers the automated intelligence to determine the exact individual to whom the alert should be directed. An organization could monitor, enterprise-wide, issues with a particular product by tracking logged complaints in the CRM system. If particular customers call in with complaints about the tracked product, Cognos NoticeCast ensures that the information goes only to the account representatives who are responsible for those customers. The solution also automatically prevents the duplication of alerts, thereby maintaining the high value of the information received.

Organizations benefit from the powerful interplay of robust business analytics from Cognos PowerPlay® and Cognos NoticeCast's unique narrowcast, push BI functionality, to pinpoint true business patterns and build agent alerts based upon that intelligence.

With intuitive, easy-to-use, agent-based technology, Cognos NoticeCast provides users across the enterprise with alert and event detection for the following:

• Notification Events: monitoring for the availability of new events such as changed or updated reports;

• Performance Events: monitoring variances in business performance measures;

• Operational Events: monitoring business risks/opportunities in the operational data as they occur.

"With Cognos NoticeCast, we offer a solution that addresses the real-world requirements and challenges of today's decision-maker," said Peter Griffiths, vice-president, research and development, Cognos. "Cognos NoticeCast gives organizations a business-driven solution to empower each individual in the organization - from customer support specialist to sales rep to CEO - with access to time-sensitive information and the context needed to make effective decisions."