FAST and Cognos Team to Deliver Enterprise Business Intelligence Through Search

– Companies Leverage the Power of Enterprise Search to Truly Deliver Business Intelligence for the Masses –

OSLO, Norway and Burlington, MA—15 May 2006— Fast Search & Transfer™ (FAST™), the leading developer of enterprise search technologies and solutions, today announced a partnership with Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions. The partnership is the foundation for a new FAST integration that joins the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP™) with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, bringing the power of business intelligence to every employee in an organization.

More than a simple integration, the combination of FAST ESP and Cognos 8 BI with Cognos Go! Search Service delivers a solution which enables users to leverage sophisticated enterprise search functionality to quickly and easily find reports, analysis, scorecards, dashboards, and other business intelligence information, along with corporate content such as documents, e-mail and other forms of structured and unstructured business information distributed across the enterprise. Leveraging the power of Contextual Insight™, FAST ESP is able to analyze and interpret the underlying meaning behind reports, not just the reports themselves, providing users with a single search across all of their information, including their business intelligence information.

The extension of enterprise search functionality to business intelligence content represents the next logical step in information access, consumption and utilization. FAST provides users with the ability to contextually reference once detached documents or information with data that has, until now, been restricted to a BI environment. With the integration of FAST ESP and Cognos 8 BI content, everyone inside an organization, whether they are sophisticated BI users or BI novices, can get immediate answers to their pressing business questions, and see links to the most relevant BI information, in a fast, intuitive and secure manner. The result is unprecedented insight into business performance.

“The union of BI and enterprise search is a major innovation for both industries,” said Patrick O’Leary, vice president of strategic alliances, Cognos. “By enabling a variety of sophisticated enterprise search techniques, FAST provides knowledge workers access to unstructured information such as documents, images, audio, video, and e-mails, in addition to the consistent and trusted BI information from Cognos 8 BI. Cognos recognizes the growing importance of enterprise search, and FAST has established a leadership position in a market that has nothing but upside. This is a significant step forward for BI, one that we hope will deliver a new range of functions for a new universe of BI users.”

“Popular ecommerce and community Web sites are changing the user expectations for software to support access to any and all information, interactivity, collaboration, and workflow,” said Dan Vesset, research director of business analytics at IDC. “Combining BI and enterprise search tools has the potential to not only improve and broaden access to information, but also to employ new analytic techniques on both structured and unstructured data in support of decision making processes.”

“Utilizing the power of FAST ESP to interface with Cognos 8 BI information, users can obtain all the benefits of enterprise search in the world of BI. FAST ESP allows enterprise users to have simple, secure and fast one-click access to meaningful, relevant and consistent data to help improve productivity and the quality of decision making,” said Ali I. Riaz, president of FAST. “By providing users with a single point of access to 100 percent of the information that is pertinent to their role within the company, FAST and Cognos are delivering on the promise of the search-driven enterprise.”

A combined solution from Cognos and FAST will enable businesses to gain four key benefits:

• Easier access to BI for a broad range of users throughout the organization
  Today’s business user has become accustomed to using search technology on the Web, corporate intranet sites, and even within their applications. The widespread adoption of search technology is changing the dynamic for accessing and utilizing information. Harnessing the analytical capabilities of Cognos 8 BI within FAST ESP opens performance information to a broader array of users.
  
  
• Secure access to a broader set of business content
  Exposing Cognos 8 BI content through Cognos Go! and FAST ESP allows all enterprise users the easiest access to the content they need to excel in their role, based on existing user authentication protocols. Together, FAST and Cognos are improving business agility by delivering precise answers so everyone in the organization can find decision-critical content quickly and with fewer clicks.
  
  
• Faster, easier and more informed decision-making
  Taking advantage of an intuitive enterprise search interface, users can access the detailed information they need to make faster more informed decisions. This solution is giving companies a single point of access to all pertinent enterprise information in real time, regardless of data format, structure or location.
  
  
• Increased value of both enterprise search and BI investments
  Increase productivity by providing workers with custom views of content based on role, access and profile, so less time and effort are spent searching and more time is spent on analysis. This solution provides a greater return on assets by aggregating information from all internal and external sources and BI to create an intelligence portal to maximize an organization’s assets.

To support the continued engineering and sales activity, Cognos and FAST have joined each other’s Alliance Partner programs. Both Cognos and FAST have built reputations within their respective industry segments for delivering innovative solutions to the world’s most sophisticated enterprise customers. Similarities in product philosophy, customer bases, and partners are expected to help to drive a synergistic relationship for both organizations moving forward.

About Cognos:
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.

Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organization’s ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? – and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies.

Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos 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.

About FAST
FAST is the leading developer of enterprise search technologies and solutions that are behind the scenes at the world’s best known companies with the most demanding search problems. FAST’s flexible and scalable enterprise search platform (FAST ESP) elevates the search capabilities of enterprise customers and connects people to the relevant information they seek regardless of medium. This drives revenues and reduces total cost of ownership by effectively leveraging IT infrastructure. FAST’s solutions are used by more than 2,600 global customers and partners, including America Online (AOL), Cardinal Health, CareerBuilder.com, Chordiant, CIGNA, CNET, Computer Associates, Dell, EMC Documentum, Factiva, Fidelity Investments, Findexa, IBM, Knight Ridder, LexisNexis, Merrill Lynch, Rakuten, Reed Elsevier, Reuters, Sensis, Stellent, Tenet Healthcare, Thomas Industrial Networks, T-Online, US Army, Virgilio (Telecom Italia), Vodafone, and Wanadoo.

FAST is headquartered in Norway and is publicly traded under the ticker symbol 'FAST' on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The FAST Group operates globally with presence in Europe, the United States, Asia Pacific, Australia, South America, and the Middle East and Africa. For further information about FAST, please visit www.fastsearch.com.