Prudential selects Cognos Enterprise Planning^TM to tighten budgeting and cost control

London, 4 April 2003—Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN) the world leader in Business Intelligence (BI) and performance management, today announces that Prudential UK, the UK's second largest insurance company, has selected Cognos Enterprise Planning^TM to simplify and speed their budgeting process in order to cut administration and achieve enhanced cost control. Prudential will replace their existing Excel system which generated over 2,000 spreadsheets with a single, real time, collaborative budgeting process from Cognos. Planned to go-live for the annual budget in July 2003, this implementation will be adopted by over 350 users in 6 locations.

"Our spreadsheet system for budgeting was an annual nightmare," explains Matthew Croft, Finance Manager at Prudential. "The process generated over 2,000 disconnected spreadsheets and took 3-4 months of solid effort from Finance to collate, check and prepare them for aggregation." The Finance team found that it was very difficult to control the versions of the individual and overall budgets as figures were queried and changed. They searched the market for a specific application with the right level of scalability to bring speed, accuracy and collaboration to the budgeting and forecasting process.

Having completed an extensive market evaluation of the possible options, Prudential selected Cognos' newly acquired planning solution from Adaytum, now known as Cognos Enterprise Planning. Prudential felt that this solution offered the most flexible and functional fit for the scale and complexity of their enterprise planning process.

"At Prudential UK we are delighted to have completed the purchase of Enterprise Planning. Having reviewed the products available in this sphere we are confident that Cognos offer the best solution to meet our needs. We fully expect this new solution to deliver substantial improvement to the quality of Prudential's corporate planning process and to enhance our management reporting and analysis capabilities. Further, the use of Enterprise Planning for preparing budgets and forecasts will provide a marked increase in the efficiency of the Finance area, " comments Richard Cole, Director Management Accounting, Prudential UK. "Once we have reaped the benefits from this area, our plan is to extend the software across the whole business providing end-to-end planning in areas such as sales activity planning, investment business cases, activity based costing and product profitability."

Cognos Enterprise Planning is designed to involve hundreds, even thousands, of users across the enterprise in the planning process without impacting performance. This architecture will enable every Prudential cost centre manager to input their budget simultaneously via the web and give Finance an instant view of the overall picture, make adjustments and communicate these consistently to each department. Enterprise Planning will enable Finance to achieve their goal to transfer more responsibility and accountability for the budgeting and forecasting to operational managers, whilst still maintaining overall control.

"A year ago we consolidated 6 business units with each operation using different methods of guiding budget decision-making. As long as we were using spreadsheets there was no common way of setting the rules. This meant that we could not compare and contrast the budget plans from different business units, as they were not based on the same assumptions. With our new planning application from Cognos, a consistent set of assumptions will drive a budget that provides full visibility to Prudential's business objectives. The net result is that everyone can see and understand what we are all trying to achieve before they enter a single figure," explains Croft.

The Cognos planning application is flexible enough to deal with the very specific requirements of some cost centres. For example, Prudential's IT function, as a no-profit, no-loss organisation, re-allocates back all service and support costs to each department, and therefore a specific approach will be used to perform their planning. Improved flexibility to react quickly to changes within the business is of particular value to the IT department, as they can instantly see the effect of planned headcount changes or IT implementations, to enable swift action to be taken.

"We expect that as the budgeting process becomes less onerous and complex, managers will feel more ownership over their departmental numbers and that Finance will be seen as more consultative and less demanding," comments Croft. "The reduction in administration will allow much more time for analysis and I am confident that this change in focus will enable us to support more cost savings across the business."

"We are delighted that Prudential believes that using Enterprise Planning will improve the visibility, accountability and reliability of the budgeting and forecasting process," comments Rein Hoogland, VP Enterprise Planning, EMEA from Cognos. "The ability to plan corporate performance consistently and accurately forms a vital part of the Corporate Performance Management vision to align strategy and action".

About Prudential UK
Prudential is a leading life and pensions provider in the UK. Prudential's UK Insurance Operations provide a range of financial products and services including annuities, corporate pensions, with-profits bonds and Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) to more than seven million customers. Its products are distributed through a number of channels including direct to customers (telephone, internet and mail), through intermediaries including Independent Financial Advisers (IFAs) and consulting actuaries, through the workplace to its corporate pension customers and via affinities and banks. The business currently employs some 7,000 staff located in offices in Stirling, Reading, Belfast and London (as at January 2003).

About Cognos, an IBM Company
Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions.

It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.
Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008.

For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com/uk/

For further information about Cognos, please contact:
Katy Lyons or Farimah Saadat at LEWIS, the PR agency

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7802 2626
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