BURLINGTON, MA, September 9, 2003—Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced the worldwide launch of Cognos ReportNet, a new Web-based enterprise query and reporting solution. Cognos ReportNet will be unveiled globally to customers, media and analysts at simultaneous events happening today in New York, Chicago, San Jose, Tokyo, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Stockholm and The Netherlands.

Cognos ReportNet offers a Web-based report and query authoring environment, extensive multi-lingual support and Web Services-based architecture to meet the needs of today's multi-national, diversified enterprises and to dramatically reduce total cost of ownership.

Cognos ReportNet offers unrivaled enterprise reporting coverage, unparalleled openness and flexibility. Designed to scale to 100s of 1,000s of users, Cognos ReportNet draws upon Cognos query and reporting leadership, delivering a revolution in reporting. It is fully integrated within the Cognos Enterprise BI solution, including flexible scorecards, dashboards, powerful industry-leading OLAP analysis, event detection and alerting, and data integration.

"Cognos' new ReportNet could set the standard for Web-based ad hoc query and end- user reporting. The pressure will be on competitors," said Dave Folger, vice-president, Web & Collaboration Strategies (WCS), META Group.

According to Giga, a wholly owned subsidiary of Forrester Research Inc, Cognos ReportNet gives Cognos a long-term advantage over competitors given the solution's focus on scalability, broad enterprise deployment, native integration with its entire product portfolio and open standards (SOAP and Web Services) approach. See full report "Cognos' ReportNet: A Radical Departure in Reporting Architecture, Licensing and Direction"

Cognos ReportNet is a major breakthrough for BI and reporting convergence. It brings a completely new level of simplicity in the design and use of reporting and analysis for large sets of users with varying needs," said Mark Smith, CEO and SVP Research, Ventana Research.

Premium car manufacturer BMW Group is in the process of establishing Cognos ReportNet as an enterprise reporting standard. Using Cognos ReportNet to create complex product quality and human resources performance reports, BMW decision-makers can quickly and easily gain insight from information housed in SAP BW and Oracle systems.

For BMW, Cognos ReportNet delivers a leading edge, modular architecture that will give the company the opportunity to extend its user community to more than 10,000 users worldwide. The pure Web interface will save considerable time and money in IT support and maintenance. Cognos ReportNet's open architecture based on SOAP and XML will allow for rapid integration with other enterprise applications, allowing BMW to leverage existing IT investments. As well, Cognos ReportNet's innovative multilingual capabilities will allow BMW to easily create reports that can be consumed by many users in the language of their choice.

Selected by a wide range of global organizations Cognos ReportNet delivers:

• Fast Time to Results—Cognos offers pixel-perfect, high-quality production reports to massive numbers of users. Delivering unprecedented flexibility and ease of use for business users, Cognos ReportNet allows customers to create complex reports with drag-and-drop simplicity.

• A Range of Reporting Requirements s—Built from the ground up from the latest Web Services technologies, Cognos ReportNet covers all reporting requirements from ad hoc query, managed reports, and business reports, to bills, statements, and invoices. With fully functional zero footprint Web-based deployment, Cognos ReportNet eliminates the need for IT to install and manage client desktop software.

• Multilingual Support —Cognos ReportNet offers multi-national organizations a one-stop reporting solution that is locale-sensitive, supported by a single metadata model and offers full Unicode support. Due to the unprecedented multilingual support, reports can be built once and consumed in over 25 languages based on user preference. Cognos ReportNet is immediately available in Japanese, English, German, and French user interfaces.

• Ability to Leverage Existing Infrastructure —Cognos ReportNet is designed to leverage existing enterprise infrastructure, giving IT administrators a completely open and data neutral solution that is both platform and enterprise infrastructure independent. Offering native support for SAP BW as well as an extensive list of relational, ERP, and other transactional systems, Cognos ReportNet allows enterprises to create a single report that can draw from a wide range of heterogeneous data sources, giving business users a single view of critical business information.

• Global Deployment—Cognos ReportNet offers an n-tier, multi-server multi-threaded architecture, lowering the enterprise cost of ownership and enabling large-scale global deployments. Cognos ReportNet's open architecture allows organizations to leverage their existing enterprise security.

"The launch of Cognos ReportNet is a game-changing event for the BI industry," said Rob Ashe, president and COO, Cognos. "Cognos ReportNet answers one the biggest pains facing today's enterprises: the need to manage and administer multiple solutions to address all of an enterprise's reporting requirements. Cognos ReportNet cuts through the complexity and delivers flexible business reporting in a pure Web, next-generation architecture."