BURLINGTON, MA, September 9, 2003—Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced educational music publishing leader Alfred Publishing has selected Cognos ReportNet for the company's global reporting requirements. A worldwide organization, with operations in UK, Germany, Singapore, and Australia, Alfred Publishing chose Cognos ReportNet to replace all of their existing reporting solutions including Crystal.

The Cognos ReportNet solution will offer unrivaled enterprise reporting coverage including production reporting, the ability to dramatically streamline report authoring and an unparalleled openness and flexibility -- all designed to meet the needs of today's multi-national, diversified enterprises and dramatically reduce total cost of ownership.

"Alfred Publishing strongly feels that Cognos ReportNet will deliver enormous competitive advantage to our organization. We will benefit from an extremely user-friendly report authoring environment that will be truly self-service to our business users. Our users will also benefit from the integration with the full breadth of Cognos enterprise BI," says Sylvie Manus, IT director and co-owner, Alfred Publishing. "Given our global reach, the extensive multilingual reporting support will greatly enhance our communications and management of our distributed European and Asia/Pacific offices."

Designed to scale to 100s of 1000s of users, Cognos ReportNet solution draws upon Cognos reporting and query leadership, delivering the next revolution of reporting. Cognos ReportNet is fully integrated with the Cognos Enterprise BI solution, including flexible scorecards, dashboards, powerful industry-leading OLAP analysis, event detection and alerting, and data integration.

With more than 15,000 titles currently in circulation throughout the world, Alfred Publishing decision makers will benefit from the flexible query and reporting capabilities, allowing them to see patterns in the data to leverage new business opportunities. Cognos ReportNet can pull information directly from a broad array of relational, operational and other ERP solutions.

"The launch of Cognos ReportNet is a game-changing event for the BI industry," said Rob Ashe, president and COO, Cognos. "Global companies like Alfred Publishing will be experiencing the unprecedented functionality of Cognos ReportNet to drive competitive advantage. This launch will enable the promise of CPM, driving, for the first time, a global reporting standard across multinational organizations."

ABOUT ALFRED PUBLISHING
Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., the world leader in music education products since 1922, is dedicated to helping people experience the joy of making music. With hundreds of expert authors and composers backed by a talented staff operating in six offices worldwide, Alfred publishes educational, reference and performance pieces for teachers, students and performers spanning every musical instrument and style.

In addition to its own titles, Alfred distributes works from the National Guitar Workshop, Studio 4 Productions, the Dover Music catalog, Faber Music and Boosey & Hawkes. Alfred is the world's largest educational music publisher with over 15,000 active print, video (DVD, VHS/PAL), software, general MIDI, CD-audio and E-CD titles currently in circulation throughout the world.