BURLINGTON, MA, November 1, 2004—Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced that leading global customers continue to standardize on Cognos enterprise business intelligence solutions. Global organizations are turning to Cognos solutions, allowing them to standardize on a single, fully integrated BI solution that delivers flexible scorecards, dashboards, powerful industry-leading OLAP analysis, complete enterprise reporting, ad hoc query, event detection and alerting, and data integration.

According to a recent report by Ventana Research, "Standardizing Business Intelligence," "Ventana Research advises CIOs to first standardize Business Intelligence solutions to achieve rapid cost savings and to improve performance management by increasing both IT and business agility and effectiveness to drive additional value for the company." The report also indicates that standardizing BI solutions is a top priority. "Standardization of business intelligence will give a faster return on investment than more costly and complex projects like ERP standardization."

Among the many new customers worldwide using Cognos as their business intelligence standard are Esselte, the leading global manufacturer of office supplies; Zarlink (NYSE/TSX:ZL), a global leader in semiconductor solutions for voice, enterprise, broadband and wireless communications; Werner, the leader in the design, production, marketing and distribution of climbing products in the United States; and the leading supply chain management firm, UTi Worldwide in South Africa.

"The reasons driving standardization in BI and reporting are core to every company - cutting costs, reducing complexity, achieving a single version of the truth, and increasing the time to value from BI," said Karen Williams, vice president, product marketing, Cognos. "Cognos offers the deepest and broadest BI footprint in the industry - key to any standards selection. Our 'write once - deploy globally' architecture gives customers the simplest and most cost-effective way to deploy BI across their organizations and beyond to customers and suppliers."

Leading organizations that have selected Cognos as their BI standard include:

ESSELTE:
Esselte, the leading global manufacturer of office supplies, has established a BI Center of Excellence in Europe, which will spearhead all BI projects throughout the global offices. Executives, managers and business analysts will leverage the Cognos solution to track and measure key performance metrics, analyze sales, marketing and supply chain information, and develop and share critical business and operational reports.

"Standardizing on Cognos as a common BI solution will help Esselte to lower the overall cost of ownership by reducing the number of BI solutions we need to manage and maintain," said Mark Katz, vice president, Worldwide Information Technology, Esselte. "This solution will provide us with better visibility and more consistent understanding and analysis of customer sales and supply chain movements."

"Another important requirement for a standard business intelligence was flexibility," said Paul Vandenhende, director of business intelligence, Esselte. "We required a common platform that would be flexible enough to supports users with different needs and different levels of sophistication. Also, performance and 24/7 availability were essential requirements for a rapidly growing user community."

ZARLINK:
Zarlink is focused on delivering the highest quality semiconductor solutions for communication technologies. With staff based around the world, it is critical to ensure that executives and managers have daily information about Zarlink's corporate performance. Zarlink has standardized on Cognos EBI Series in conjunction with SAP systems across its global research and development, product marketing, sales, operations and finance organizations.

"With Cognos scorecarding we are able to efficiently create tailor-made information for specific individuals and groups, and push that information out to stakeholders with a minimum of IT intervention," said Bill O'Connor, CIO, Zarlink Semiconductor. "Cognos EBI Series has helped us provide our key decision-makers with unprecedented visibility into the performance of the business."

WERNER:
By standardizing on Cognos PowerPlay and selecting Cognos ReportNet, Werner will replace a number of in-house querying, reporting, and analysis tools to enable more consistent and timely information delivery and access enterprise-wide. With Cognos, Werner decision makers will be able to better monitor and analyze business performance via the Web through a combination of personalized, managed reports and multidimensional cubes accessed via a secure portal.

"Cognos is allowing us to better drive our corporate performance because we now have a single version of the truth on our sales and manufacturing operations. Cognos has made it possible for my managers to easily understand the key metrics that they are responsible for so that the company as a whole can better respond to business needs as they arise," said Robert Rosati, Executive Vice President and CIO, Werner. "With Cognos ReportNet and PowerPlay, we will have a true self-service reporting and analysis environment that will allow us to leverage the rich information housed in IBM and PeopleSoft solutions."

UTI WORLDWIDE:
Choosing Cognos over a number of competitive solutions, UTi Worldwide selected Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence Series scorecarding, dashboarding, analysis and data integration as well as Cognos ReportNet for monitoring its supply chain performance.

With a substantial global client base, UTi Worldwide was looking for a business intelligence solution that could provide the scalability, ease of use and multilingual support they required to address the needs of its growing business. Selecting Cognos ReportNet and the full breadth of the Cognos EBI Series, UTi will use Cognos to standardize and consolidate all enterprise reporting requirements on a single solution.

"Cognos offers us a solution that will create a true self-serve Web-based reporting environment for our business decision-makers as well as an easy-to-administer scorecarding solution. Time to decision is a key issue in our business where speed counts," said Walter Mapham, director of strategic services, UTi. "Under our old system, reporting was inflexible and labor intensive. With Cognos ReportNet we expect to be able to create complex business reports and identify management action in a matter of minutes, putting critical information in the hands of users, driving competitive advantage."

ABOUT COGNOS
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management, delivers software that helps companies drive, monitor and understand corporate performance.

Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage - Corporate Performance Management (CPM) - achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale. Our integrated CPM solution helps customers drive performance through planning; monitor performance through scorecarding; and understand performance through business intelligence.

Cognos serves more than 22,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos enterprise business intelligence solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.