FileNet And Cognos Extend Alliance To Deliver Demonstrable Process-Enabling Business Performance Management

– FileNet P8 and Cognos 8 BI integration provides a holistic view of business processes in context with enterprise business performance, helping organizations quickly react to changing business conditions –

FILENET AMERICAS USERNET 2005, LAS VEGAS, NV November 8, 2005- FileNet Corporation (NASDAQ: FILE), the leading provider of enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) solutions, and Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced the two companies have extended their partnership to deliver demonstrable process-enabling business performance management, geared to helping organizations make faster and more effective decisions at the most relevant points in a business process.

Under terms of the extended agreement, FileNet and Cognos will co-operatively market their respective platforms, the FileNet P8 platform and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI), to customers. The two companies will now be able to deliver jointly-developed solution templates that create frameworks for easy application deployments, and provide a holistic view of business process and business intelligence information through a number of integration points:

• Business intelligence on process – process data provided by FileNet is enriched and aggregated with enterprise data from Cognos 8 BI.

• Business intelligence embedded within process – BI information essential for decision-making is easily incorporated into each process step of a FileNet BPM process, so users have all the information required to make the best decision at the right time.

• Event-driven process – proactive monitoring, detection, and alerting capabilities found in Cognos 8 BI’s unique business event management functionality enable management-level business processes to be automatically initiated and resolved through FileNet when required.

According to a July 2005 Forrester Research report*, the market is on the brink of what Forrester terms a “Process to Data (P2D)” explosion, as more BI and BPM vendors begin to recognize the business value in establishing formal technology relationships. “What is different today is that companies are looking for a better way of linking the decision-making process with existing workflow to gain an improvement in business performance,” stated Keith Gile, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “For this to happen, BI/xPM solutions must include a consistent mechanism for defining and using pre-defined processes, while BPM must include a mechanism to analyze and report on business process performance.”

For customers, an integrated FileNet-Cognos offering improves productivity by delivering relevant information at the point in the business process where key decisions must be made. Making business performance data useful to a wide range of employees helps strengthen decision-making across the enterprise, provides greater insight into how work is accomplished, and enables companies to close the gaps between current and desired operational performance goals. Furthermore, organizations can quickly detect a performance trend or issue, then automatically launch a business process in response to this alert.

“Cognos and FileNet’s commitment to delivering business intelligence embedded in the process holds significant promise for forward-looking organizations like SunTrust,” said James “Bubba” Small, senior vice-president, senior delivery manager at SunTrust Banks, Inc. “As one of the largest commercial banking organizations in the United States, it is fundamental to our ongoing success that we arm our knowledge workers with up-to-date business intelligence data when it matters most, during key decision-intensive points of the business process.”

Additionally, Cognos and FileNet’s process-enabling BI collaboration helps facilitate regulatory and corporate governance compliance. All BI information used in a process can be recorded, facilitating future analysis and providing proper context in which a decision is made. This historical visibility allows customers to prove and substantiate what drove business process decisions, thus delivering critical accountability and audit.

“Enterprises continue to make investments in both automating their business processes, and analyzing their enterprise data. The next logical step is to synchronize the value of both initiatives,” said Leah MacMillan, vice-president of product marketing at Cognos. “Leveraging BI with business process capabilities that span both people and systems is the ignition switch to more active and effective decision-making. By collaborating with FileNet, we are helping organizations gain deeper contextual intelligence about their business processes, which can result in a clearer view of the overall health of a project, a program or the enterprise as a whole.”

“Organizations today must be more agile in responding to customer demands and changing competitive dynamics,” said Martyn Christian, chief marketing officer at FileNet. “To accomplish this, businesses are demanding that information required to make decisions and monitor business performance is directly integrated with the business processes that drive the organization. FileNet’s integration with Cognos creates a unique solution, which other BPM and BI vendors alone cannot provide.”

* -- Source: “Business Process Management (BPM) Meets BI and Performance Management (xPM) Head On” Keith Gile, Connie Moore with Colin Teubner, Forrester Research, 27 July 2005

ABOUT FILENET P8:
FileNet P8 enables organizations to streamline and automate business processes, access and manage all forms of content, and automate records management to help meet compliance needs. FileNet P8 is a reliable, scalable and highly available enterprise platform that enables organizations to capture, store, manage, secure and process information to increase operational efficiency and lower total cost of ownership. More information on FileNet P8 can be found at http://www.filenet.com/English/Products/FileNet_P8_Platform/index.asp .

ABOUT COGNOS 8 BI:
Cognos 8 BI is the industry’s first Web services based solution to deliver the complete range of BI functionality – including comparative analysis, dimensional reporting, active dashboards and scorecards, and business event management – in a single product, on a single proven architecture. With its zero-footprint interface, Cognos 8 BI delivers a simplified BI environment that drives high user adoption, enables better decision-making, and serves as an enterprise-scale technology foundation for performance management, now and in the future. More information on Cognos 8 BI can be found at http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/index.html

ABOUT FILENET:
FileNet Corporation helps organizations make better decisions by managing the content and processes that drive their business. FileNet’s enterprise content management (ECM) solutions allow customers to build and sustain competitive advantage by managing content throughout their organizations, automating and streamlining their business processes, and providing a spectrum of connectivity needed to simplify their critical and everyday decision-making.

FileNet ECM products are designed to deliver a broad set of capabilities that integrate with existing information systems to provide cost-effective solutions that solve real-world business problems.

Since the Company’s founding in 1982, more than 4,000 organizations, including more than three quarters of the FORTUNE 100, have taken advantage of FileNet solutions for help in managing their mission-critical content and processes.

Headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., FileNet markets its innovative ECM solutions in more than 90 countries through its own global sales, professional services and support organizations, as well as via its ValueNet® Partner network of resellers, system integrators and application developers

About Cognos:

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 and performance management 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.