Burlington, MA, April 15, 2002—Cognos® (Nasdaq: COGN; TSE: CSN), the leading global provider of business intelligence solutions, today announced the immediate availability of Cognos Planning, a new module for Cognos Finance. Designed to give decision-makers a Web-based planning environment to plot business direction, Cognos Planning extends the value of Cognos Finance's world-class budgeting, reporting, consolidation, and forecasting functionality, resulting in the industry's most complete financial solution.

Cognos Planning features built-in collaboration, which accelerates and simplifies the planning process. Corporate plans are created, shared, and returned for approval — enabling users to participate in the corporate planning process. Working within the context of the corporate plan, users can ask 'what if' questions based on a wide range of user-defined business scenarios — enabling them to assess the impact of their scenario before deciding on a course of action.

"As a long-time user of Cognos Finance, we see Cognos Planning as a critical addition to our business in today's challenging economic climate," said Rose Melillo, financial systems manager, Murray International, industry-leading manufacturer of lawn tractors, walk-behind mowers, and recreational vehicles. "Murray is focused on rapidly responding to consumer demand, evaluating and re-evaluating our business direction to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction in our industry. Cognos Planning will allow us to ensure we have a rapid response system to analyze and make refinements or major strategic changes to our business depending on market conditions."

"Creating effective business models and driving 'what-if' analysis has become a strategic imperative for organizations looking to compete effectively in today's market. Planning tools have become not a 'nice to have' but a critically important investment for enterprises. Tools that provide the CFO and other financial professionals with a flexible but robust environment for planning while at the same time offering collaborative capabilities will be in high demand," said John Van Decker, program director, META Group.

The Planning Process
Planning takes into account new business measures that are ideal for quantifying the business - with top down adjustments across the plan. The planning process complements all of the core financial processes and addresses three classic behaviors:

• Business Modeling — Business models in Cognos Planning can be defined around a fully multidimensional matrix. Rich modeling capabilities enable organizations to express any aspect of their business in measures, ratios, or calculations.

• Collaborative Workflow — Collaborative functionality is key in order to enable sharing of core business knowledge and extending the opportunity for business managers to model their own business. Cognos Planning delivers an easy, iterative workflow environment, providing a highly collaborative planning environment for all planners to co-ordinate their business.

• Flexible Data Interaction — Cognos Planning delivers instant feedback at the moment any data is changed. The user benefits from two extremely valuable interactions - top down and back-solve. Top-down adjustments enable users to make data changes at a summary level and see the immediate impact on the model. Back solve takes planning to the next level, allowing users to enter a desired result in a calculation and drive the answer back through all the calculations.

"Cognos Finance now provides five related key processes in one application," said Colin McAlpin, vice president, Cognos Analytic Application Marketing. "Financial managers are able to broadcast and retrieve budgets and forecasts, and plan in a coordinated fashion. Additionally, they can consolidate actuals and produce financial statements and management reports. The Cognos Planning module extends the value of Cognos Finance allowing organizations to respond to market pressures with a complete financial application designed to cover their current and future needs."

Availability
The planning module with Cognos Finance is available immediately.