BURLINGTON, MA, October 7, 2002—Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), a world leader in business intelligence (BI), today announced widespread partner endorsement for Cognos® Metrics Manager. Cognos Metrics Manager is a dynamic scorecarding solution that enables organizations to actively monitor, analyze, and report at every level of the business. Key partners including Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard have endorsed the solution. 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.

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.

"With the support of our partners, we are excited to offer our joint customers a revolutionary solution to meet the goal-driven requirements demanded by today's enterprise," said Patrick O'Leary, Cognos vice president of strategic alliances. "With Cognos Metrics Manager, Cognos is delivering a scorecarding solution that provides unsurpassed functionality, allowing organizations to link individual execution with overall business strategy across the enterprise, fulfilling a critical element of effective corporate performance management."

Cognos Metrics Manager has received key endorsements from several of the company's strategic technology partners.

Ascential Software:
"Ascential is pleased to support Cognos in its launch of Cognos Metrics Manager," said Bob Zurek, vice president of advanced technologies for Ascential Software Corporation. "As the industry's first comprehensive suite of enterprise data integration solutions with unlimited linear scalability and meta data management, Ascential's new Enterprise Integration Suite is the ideal engine to drive analytics, which help customers better understand their data for more informed decision-making. The combination of Cognos Metrics Manager and the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite gives joint customers the benefits of complete, enterprise-wide, fully scalable data integration and the leading solution for business intelligence."

eBusiness Advantage:
"Cognos is at the forefront of the scorecarding revolution, with a scalable, mission-critical solution that is enterprise-proven. The Global 2000 has embraced Cognos to monitor, analyze and report on key business drivers," said Mohamed Zakir Hussain, chief technology officer, eBusiness Advantage. "Because Cognos Metrics Manager supports interactive problem exploration, decision-makers can achieve immediate insight into critical business information."

Hewlett-Packard:
"Cognos Metrics Manager enables executives to analyze key performance indicators from top to bottom and across the enterprise's business units," said Nigel Ball, vice president and general manager Enterprise Solutions Partners, Hewlett-Packard. "Through our partnership with Cognos, and with the launch of Cognos Metrics Manager, HP and Cognos will allow our customers to form tighter relationships, improve business collaboration, and generate new revenue opportunities by exposing existing assets and leveraging them into new business models."

IBM:
"We look forward to helping customers deploy Cognos Metrics Manager on IBM DB2 business intelligence software to help them analyze patterns and trends in their data to make rapid business decisions to gain a competitive advantage," said Lauren Flaherty, vice president of marketing, IBM Data Management Solutions. "Cognos applications running on DB2 OLAP Server will deliver customers a complete enterprise wide corporate performance management environment, further allowing them to derive business value and extend the reach of business intelligence solutions into new and emerging markets."

Microsoft:
"Business intelligence has become pervasive. Enterprise leaders widely recognize that their employees everywhere need access to critical business information to make smart decisions. Cognos Metrics Manager provides the cause-and-effect understanding and analysis of measures and metrics that can be directly linked to corporate strategy," said Brian Biglin, product manager for the Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence group at Microsoft Corp. "We are pleased with the continued integration Cognos delivers to leverage the Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services platform throughout enterprises. We believe that this solution will provide tremendous benefits to our mutual customers."

Onyx Software:
"Like Cognos, Onyx understands the critical need to measure and analyze customer behavior and respond quickly to the changing marketplace and internal trends," said Bryan Smoltz, director of product marketing at Onyx Software. "We believe that by supporting Cognos Metrics Manager, we will bring major value to the companies currently leveraging Cognos technology and to Onyx customers and prospects interested in enhancing their analytics and reporting structures."

Plumtree Software:
"Many of our joint customers want to be able to create portal pages that display Key Performance Indicators based on Cognos data," said Hilary Jules, director of alliances at Plumtree. "We are excited about working with Cognos to support their efforts to integrate Cognos Metrics Manager with the Plumtree Corporate Portal."

Sane Solutions:
"We are pleased to be supporting the launch of Cognos Metrics Manager, which extends Cognos' vision of corporate performance management as the future of business intelligence," said Jim Rose, CEO of Sane Solutions. "Companies need to monitor, analyze, and understand metrics at every level of their business. Using our two best-of-breed solutions, companies can gain valuable insight into their Internet business channel by analyzing Web site metrics and combining their online business analysis with offline business metrics for business intelligence that extends across all channels."