BURLINGTON, MA, October 1, 2002—Cognos (Nasdaq:COGN; TSX:CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI), announced that Cognos NoticeCast, the leading event detection, notification and management solution in Cognos Series 7 BI, has been selected by a broad cross-section of Global 2,000, vertical market leaders and government organizations looking to effectively monitor key business events. Designed for customers needing critical elements of business activity monitoring (BAM) and guided analysis, Cognos NoticeCast allows business users to easily define highly personalized business alerts that can be delivered to any e-mail-enabled device.

Cognos has led the market in providing event detection and event management capabilities across the BI framework. Recently enhanced to offer rich HTML-formatted alerts Cognos NoticeCast provides not only details on the event, but guided analysis to additional highly filtered and event focused information such as customer order history reports and performance against service level agreements (SLAs). Using links to other applications as well as ready access to contact information and other related URLs, business users can take informed, positive business action to manage corporate events.

Delivering these rich, targeted alerts on BI content in business-critical timeframes, gives decision-makers the context they need from transactional or operational data on systems such as ERP, supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), or any relational data store. By validating business alerts against BI content and filtering out non-significant events, Cognos ensures business users only receive information that can drive immediate action such as accelerated responses to customer complaints.

A concept formulated by Gartner, Inc. and a key pillar of any corporate performance management (CPM) framework, BAM is defined as the means by which business users receive real-time feedback on day-to-day business events in the context of corporate objectives.

"Today, BI solutions aim to give enterprises the key information and perspective that they need to make critical business decisions. But whether these solutions offer only simple reporting or complex scorecards, varying degrees of latency, or delay, are built in to them. By the time the decision makers see the information, it may be too old to be of use. BAM promises to eliminate that latency, giving the decision makers 'instant insight,' buying them additional time in which to respond to critical business events," said Howard Dresner, vice president and research director in Gartner Research. (excerpted from the April 2002 report "BAM: Giving the Decision Makers 'Instant Insight')

With the powerful interplay of Cognos analysis and the narrowcast, active BI approach with Cognos NoticeCast, Cognos Series 7 allows for the automation and tracking of best practices. For example, a customer services representative determines through analysis that any customer that calls in with a high priority issue within three months of their service contract renewal is in danger of leaving. The customer service representative can then set up alerts for key account managers, letting them know instantly when their key customers log high priority issues within this critical three-month timeframe. This allows decision-makers to take action, even on the basis of operational data, thus automating a known best practice and guiding teams to effective decision making.

Cognos NoticeCast has been embraced by a wide cross-section of new and existing Cognos customers such as Boehringer Ingelheim NV, Tiger Foods Brand Limited and the City of Albuquerque.

"With today's announcement Cognos continues to push aggressively toward an end-to-end CPM solution, enhancing our already unprecedented business intelligence framework. With Cognos NoticeCast, Cognos Series 7 delivers a solution that allows enterprises to bring the power of business intelligence to anyone, anywhere — in a business-critical time frame," said Dave Laverty, senior vice-president, global marketing, Cognos. "Innovative companies today are using Cognos Series 7 to monitor, analyze and manage their corporate performance."