SAP Customers Extend Investment With Cognos Performance Management Solutions

– The combination of Cognos’ world-class enterprise planning capabilities with mySAP™ applications quickly delivers improved performance visibility and control for global finance organizations –

ORLANDO, FL - SAPPHIRE ’06 &mdash May 16, 2006— At SAPPHIRE ’06 Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM) solutions, today announced that Cognos customers worldwide are quickly and successfully extending the value of their mySAP applications with Cognos’ leading capabilities for enterprise planning and performance management.

Selected by enterprises worldwide, Cognos delivers dynamic and effective global-scale enterprise planning and performance management capabilities alongside mySAP applications to help improve performance management decision-making. Global customers who are using Cognos to extend SAP solutions for managing best-in-class performance include:

Puget Sound Energy is Washington State's oldest and largest energy utility, providing electric service to more than 1 million customers and natural gas service to more than 693,000 in 11 Washington counties. As a regulated utility, Puget Sound Energy is following a strategy that emphasizes meeting the energy needs of its customer base through incremental, cost-effective energy conservation, low-cost procurement of energy resources, such as wind power, and prudent investment in energy-delivery infrastructure. Cognos Planning was recently selected to help the management team at Puget Sound Energy improve budgeting, planning, and forecasting processes across its business.

“We selected Cognos Planning to help extend the capabilities of our mySAP ERP system in a flexible environment for our business users,” said Brenda Bartell at Puget. “We wanted a solution that could help us move beyond traditional budgeting to achieve continuous planning. We implemented the budgeting element of our project in just 47 days and are now working on streamlining forecasting. Ultimately, this move should help us re-allocate resources more effectively so that we can better serve our customers.”

One of Sweden’s largest financial management companies, Folksam, adopted a full Cognos performance management solution in 2003. More than 750 employees use Cognos business intelligence, planning and scorecarding capabilities on a daily basis alongside mySAP (for SAP® R/3® data) for quick input on market trends, scenario planning and forecasting work, the calculation of revenue and cost balance sheets, sales planning and risk management.

“Before we implemented Cognos, almost 60 percent of the time in the follow-up process was devoted to collecting and consolidating data, while only 40 percent remained for proactive business analysis of information. We have been able to reach our goal of devoting no more than 15 percent of our time to collecting and compiling figures. Today, we are able to use our ‘business intelligence’ more strategically by integrating it with forward-looking financial and operational goals and processes during the remainder of the time,” said Mikael Öhlund, executive vice president and financial manager of Folksam.

WEKA Verlag AG, is a Swiss publishing company with a portfolio of 300 products, which are distributed via six different sales channels using five different subscription models. In order to plan successfully for its subscription business and the associated production and financial development requirements, the company implemented Cognos Planning on top of its mySAP (for SAP R/3 data) system.

“In the subscription planning process here at WEKA, we find that dealing with existing customers in particular is highly complex but also very important,” said Nicolas Schloesser, head of Finance and IT, Board Member, WEKA Verlag AG. “In this area, Cognos has given us new ways of fully exploiting our options for planning with mySAP (for SAP R/3-derived data).”

“Cognos continues to deliver innovative enterprise planning capabilities of strategic value to the SAP community,” said Rich Lanahan, vice-president, Office of Finance and Planning Solutions for Performance Management, Cognos. “With Cognos Planning and our broad set of world-class performance management solutions, we are helping organizations combine investments across multiple ERP and legacy transaction systems to meet current needs, automate and integrate key financial and operational processes, and transform performance management decision-making for sustainable competitive advantage.”

About Cognos Planning on mySAP
Cognos Planning can be used across multiple instances and versions of mySAP applications. Its flexible design helps business stakeholders directly develop, revise and deploy best-practice planning models to increase responsiveness and improve cross-functional planning across the enterprise. This distributed environment alleviates additional work for the IT group and is independent of changes to SAP and non-SAP IT investments behind the scenes. Through its full suite of Performance Blueprints, which include best-practices and in-depth business processes across industries and the enterprise, the Cognos enterprise planning solution automates and transforms performance management processes to help organizations quickly create more business value.

For further information on Cognos Solutions for mySAP visit: http://www.cognos.com/solutions4SAP.

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.