BURLINGTON, MA, October 7, 2002—Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX:CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI), today announced Cognos® Metrics Manager, a dynamic scorecarding solution that enables organizations to actively monitor, analyze, and report at every level of the business. Cognos Metrics Manager is the latest example of the company's corporate performance management (CPM) vision in action - delivering software that allows enterprise companies to measure execution against business strategy.

This breakthrough performance solution adds a new dimension - "management" - to business metrics. Global 2000 organizations today have been forced to report critical budgeting, forecasting plans, and actuals using spreadsheets and presentations, which is largely a manual and non-integrated process. Using Cognos Metrics Manager, organizations can now focus on performance by linking execution and accountability to goals. For these companies, Cognos Metrics Manager enables self-sufficiency, allowing individuals to access metrics that are directly linked to the corporate strategy and to prioritize accordingly.

As part of the Cognos Series 7 BI solution, Cognos Metrics Manager gives decision-makers a rich environment to exploit the extensive range of Cognos Series 7 functionality including visualizations, reports, and analysis. This integration enables a truly collaborative decision-making environment for business users, allowing them to easily share and distribute information tied to key performance indicators. The decision-making flow moves cleanly from "what" is happening to "why" it is happening.

"Balanced scorecard implementations often fail because the underlying business intelligence is missing. Tightly integrated BI is critical to the success of any scorecard initiative because without it people can't ask critical questions such as 'Why is the scorecard metric on or off track?' and 'What can I do about it?'," said Frank Buytendijk, research director at Gartner. "Business Intelligence tools allow users to drill down and find the detail behind the questions."

"The need for greater visibility into business performance is critical for companies today," said Henry Morris, vice president of Applications and Information Access at IDC. "With Metrics Manager, Cognos adds highly visual, cross-functional performance management to its portfolio of business intelligence tools and analytic applications. This should be welcome news for Cognos' customers and business partners."

"Staying on top of the factors that drive our business is critical in this tumultuous economic environment," said Harry Hixson, CTX Mortgage Company senior vice president of information technology. "Cognos Metrics Manager is easy to use and powerful enough to provide the scorecarding solution we need to manage business performance across our company."

Cognos Metrics Manager's 'open methodology' approach ensures customers can implement any of a number of quality/performance initiatives including Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, ISO 9000, EFQM and Total Quality Management (TQM), and manage these performance methodologies with Cognos solutions. It also provides out-of-the-box implementation and features simple, intuitive user interfaces making it easy for employees at all levels of an organization to learn and use.

Executives and managers worldwide are already using Cognos BI to better monitor and manage enterprise performance. Organizations from healthcare, financial services, the public sector, and manufacturing are using Cognos dashboarding and scorecarding solutions to link individual execution with overall business strategy across the enterprise, fulfilling a critical element of effective CPM.

"Cognos was the first BI vendor to articulate a vision for the strategic application of business intelligence. Our clear leadership position in the scorecarding market today shows that we have a solid and successful track record. The introduction of Cognos Metrics Manager will only extend that lead. Delivering solutions that help organizations align business strategy with execution across the enterprise continues to be our mandate," said Rob Ashe, president and chief operating officer at Cognos.