BURLINGTON, MA, September 13, 2004— Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced that Cognos PowerPlay® has been selected a winner in the Best OLAP Tool category of Penton Media's SQL Server Magazine Readers' Choice Awards.

"Cognos has a long history of supporting Microsoft users with the industry's best tools for accessing, analyzing, and sharing critical enterprise-wide corporate information," said Patrick O'Leary, Cognos vice president of strategic alliances. "This award is further recognition that Cognos continues to support and extend the Microsoft platform to provide mission critical business intelligence for customers - and that support provides tremendous benefits to our customers."

As the most deployed OLAP solution, Cognos PowerPlay offers a high degree of user flexibility to navigate huge amounts of data including third party OLAP solutions. With key analysis features, delivered through a zero footprint user interface, business users can easily understand the performance of their organization. It is tightly integrated with and is part of the Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence Series, including Cognos ReportNet and Cognos Metrics Manager. Cognos embraces and extends Microsoft's data warehousing platform and infrastructure, enhancing the value of the platform with its best-of-breed, end-to-end solutions.

As planned, Cognos also announced the general availability of Cognos PowerPlay® 7.3. With this availability, Cognos further enhances the Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence Series, which includes Cognos PowerPlay, Cognos ReportNetT, and Cognos Metrics Manager, delivering critical business data to the broadest range of users.

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