Cognos Extends Focus on Customer Success With New Professional Services Initiatives

– Industry-leading professional services offerings help enterprise customers, consultants, and partners accelerate Cognos deployments –

BURLINGTON, MASS., April 5, 2006— Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced new professional services initiatives for customers to help maximize value, improve performance and drive user adoption. The new professional services initiatives further address the growing demand for large-scale Cognos standardization and performance management deployments among enterprise customers.

“Services are a key component to delivering customer success, especially in the area of BI standardization and enterprise-level BI. Customers want to know the best course of action to take, associated costs along the way, what to expect and when,” said David Pratt, vice president, global professional services at Cognos. “Our mandate is to address these needs and aggressively expand our professional services focus to help customers and partners deploy Cognos solutions quickly, efficiently, and with measurable return on their investment.”

"Executing every business intelligence (BI)-related initiative requires a wealth of technology skills, best practices, frameworks and knowledge of multiple functional areas. Completing BI initiatives in a timely manner takes a significant investment for an organization to develop expertise in these subjects. As a consequence, the demand for consulting and systems integration companies has steadily increased as a way to close the skill gap that exists in many organizations. At the same time that demand is growing, service providers are using frameworks and methodologies for repeatable, scalable development and deployment processes," writes Bill Hostmann, vice president, Gartner, in the recently published Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Implementation Services, North America, 2006.*

Building on existing innovative customer service offerings, Cognos continues to increase its investment in professional services to better support enterprise customers with their deployments and help drive customer success. Cognos today announced:

Extended Enterprise Focus
Enterprise customers have diverse needs ranging from targeted departmental implementations to enterprise-wide solutions. As a result, Cognos is significantly growing its delivery ability by increasing domain product and implementation expertise and client engagement management skills in key geographies including the U.S., United Kingdom, and Germany. Cognos consultants worldwide are available to offer customers deep product knowledge and client engagement management skills that are critical to successful implementations and mitigating risk.

Cognos Solutions Implementation Methodology
Cognos has designed a five-phased implementation process for Cognos software that includes an implementation roadmap for each product family. The implementation roadmaps guide customers and partners with structured steps, tools, role definitions, tips and techniques. This proven methodology, along with supporting tools and proven practices, ensures consistent and collaborative implementations by Cognos Professional Services, partners and customers worldwide. The Enterprise BI Implementation Roadmap is now generally available to customers, consultants and partners. Others, including Enterprise Planning and Consolidation, will be available in 2006.

The Cognos Solutions Implementation Methodology was created in conjunction with Accenture, the global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company.

“Business Intelligence is an essential component of the Information Management agenda. And while companies recognize that they need to invest in technology solutions, they also realize that, without an effective delivery approach, benefits can be elusive,” said Royce Bell, CEO of Accenture Information Management Services. “Our goal in working with Cognos to develop its Solutions Implementation Methodology was to help enable the multiple players within the Cognos ecosystem – customers, technology partners, and services providers – benefit from tested delivery methods.”

Denver-based JCB Partners, LLC has implemented Cognos solutions for the past five years. A Cognos Platinum Partner and the 2005 North American Services Partner of the Year, JCB shared its process insights and industry expertise with Cognos as it developed the Cognos Solutions Implementation Methodology.

“The Cognos SIM is a solid process based on proven practices that will help Cognos partners standardize customer implementations and reach new levels of success,” said Brad Smith, managing partner, JCB Partners, LLC. “We are currently using the Enterprise BI Implementation Roadmap and look forward to additional roadmaps later this year.”

Cognos Academy
The Cognos Academy is a training and certification program focused on expanding the product and methodology certification of Cognos consultants and partners with requirements to have deep technical ability in-house. The four-week in-depth blended learning curriculum is a combination of self study and standard classroom sessions. This advanced curriculum goes beyond standard product training and includes methodologies, proven practices, case studies, and certification training. It provides an option for faster certification on Cognos products.

More information on Cognos and its award-winning Professional Services can be found at http://support.cognos.com.

* Source: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Implementation Services, North America, 2006, A. Soejarto, B. Hostmann, March 3, 2006.

About Cognos:
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management, delivers software and services that help companies drive, monitor and understand corporate performance.

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.