HOUSTON, TX & BURLINGTON, MA, December 14, 2004— Acorn Systems, the best-of-breed costing and profitability analytics vendor, and Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced a global alliance to deliver comprehensive activity based costing and corporate performance management solutions.

The two companies have entered into a strategic technology partnership, in which they have integrated Acorn Systems activity based costing and the BI components of Cognos' corporate performance management suite, comprised of: Cognos Enterprise BI Series, the industry's most comprehensive business intelligence solution; Cognos Enterprise Planning Series, the industry-leading solution for planning, budgeting, modeling, and forecasting; and Cognos Metrics Manager, the most robust and flexible enterprise scorecarding solution. Organizations can drive profitable growth by making opportunities more transparent and actionable through visibility of product, service and customer profitability. As part of their agreement, Acorn Systems and Cognos will undertake joint market development, with special emphasis on financial services, distribution, consumer packaged goods and retail sectors.

According to a recent Gartner¹ report, "The metrics, the definitions and the underlying data should be consistent, but various users will make different uses of the data at various levels. On an aggregated level, the metrics come together in, for example, a balanced scorecard for the enterprise. To translate scorecard metrics into operational drivers, managers may use the same data for an activity-based costing exercise. The same definitions are used again for planning purposes. Finally, the outcome and corresponding planning data are aggregated to feed the metrics at the strategic level."

Acorn Systems Profit AnalyzerT delivers undeniably accurate enterprise scalable cost and profit metrics to enhance Cognos' industry leading CPM solution by providing:

• More accurate, accessible and actionable data to drive CPM throughout the organization
• Greatly reduced data collection and model updating times to shorten decision time
• The ability to recalculate costs dynamically for ease of maintenance and more frequent reports
• Visibility into cost, revenue, and capacity numbers around any desired dimension
• Transaction-level accuracy coupled with enterprise-wide scalability to discover underlying cause of performance

"With accurate, readily available and actionable enterprise-wide costing data joint customers will gain the full benefit of corporate performance management," said Patrick O'Leary, vice president of strategic alliances, Cognos. "In partnership with Cognos, Acorn System solutions enable companies to understand the underlying drivers of net profitability of individual customers, services, products and transactions. Cognos and Acorn Systems help organizations create a results-producing performance-driven culture with greater focus on growth and profit from their workforce."

"Numerous clients in Financial Services, Life sciences, Distribution, and Government sectors have already invested in and successfully implemented both Cognos and Acorn's solutions to create a powerful 'best of breed' activity based costing and BI solution," said Chris Fraga, executive vice president of Worldwide Alliances and Business Development for Acorn. "Our clients and prospects are increasingly focused on a more holistic solution that combines both companies' core competencies. These include critical elements of Performance Management such as, BI, and Budget, Planning, Forecasting and Consolidation solutions. Teaming with the market leader like Cognos enables Acorn to broaden our solution footprint to achieve this vision, while fulfilling the needs of our joint clients."

ABOUT ACORN SYSTEMS
Acorn Systems is the leader in activity based costing, profit management and optimization solutions. Acorn Systems helps clients to measure, analyze, predict, and then optimize Net Operating Profits at any level of granularity desired including products, vendors, customers, even individual transactions, in order to maximize shareholder value. Acorn's clients come from many industries including Financial Services, Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods, Government, Telecommunications, Manufacturing, and Distribution in the Metals, Foods, Electronics, Paper, Healthcare and Chemicals industries. For more information, visit www.acornsys.com, or call 1-800-98ACORN.

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 23,000 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.