Cognos and IBM extend strategic alliance to deliver on-demand Workforce Performance Management


~ IBM bundles Cognos 8 Workforce Performance into its HR Business Transformation Outsourcing service to enable timely workforce reporting, analysis for global customers ~



LONDON, England, Wednesday, February 21, 2007 – Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the provider of business intelligence and performance management solutions, and IBM (NYSE: IBM), has announced the two companies will deliver a workforce performance management solution through IBM’s world-leading Human Resources Business Transformation Outsourcing (BTO) service.

Under terms of the agreement, IBM has selected Cognos 8 Workforce Performance as a standard analytic and reporting solution to be delivered within its full-service Human Capital Management (HCM) outsourcing solutions portfolio.

The addition of Cognos 8 Workforce Performance extends IBM services to its clients by teaming their HCM capabilities with valuable analytic insight into workforce trends and influencing factors within the talent management cycle. This includes visibility into key performance areas such as workforce strength, employee turnover, compensation and incentives, talent segmentation and performance ratings.

Through this alliance, IBM BTO customers will benefit from an outsourced HR services model that can enable the organisation to identify and prioritise headcount needs, optimise and align workforce investments to corporate goals, improve employee job satisfaction, nurture career growth, and reduce turnover.

IBM selected Cognos’ next-generation analytic application because of the solution’s packaged workforce content, and its ability to quickly adapt to a wide range of customer and business requirements. The Cognos 8 Workforce Performance solution is a configurable analytic application designed to reflect a company’s human resources best practices. It provides a rich library of pre-packaged reports and analytics on a wide range of key workforce metrics, all of which can be easily modified or extended with the evolving information needs of the business.

“IBM prides itself in delivering solutions and services that unlock business value, reduce risk through technical and process improvements, and recognise tangible program cost savings,” said Steve Kagan, general manager, IBM Human Resources BTO. “Using Cognos as an embedded workforce performance reporting and analysis engine, IBM is setting a new HR outsourcing standard that delivers better workforce performance visibility that can evolve as our customers develop the attributes of a truly on-demand business.”

“IBM and Cognos share a common vision for providing cost-effective solutions that enable organisations to more effectively deal with significant human resources issues such as the greying workforce, impending skills gap, and increased market competition for talent,” said Doug Barton, vice president of product marketing at Cognos. “Cognos is proud to have been selected by IBM as a workforce performance partner in helping deliver a stronger and more strategic HR function for IBM BTO customers worldwide.”

Underpinning the Cognos application’s flexibility is an open Adaptive Application Framework that increases business agility while also reducing costs and the over-reliance on scarce IT resources. Based on the open, modern services-oriented architecture found in Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, Cognos 8 Workforce Performance enables organisations to easily extract and transform transactional workforce data into consistent, reliable and relevant management information, helping to reduce errors and cut reporting cycles. Cognos 8 Workforce Performance is controlled and automated through a single, model-driven configuration interface, which leverages underlying engines needed to transform the source data, populate the meta data repository and generate all reports and analysis that are fully customised to the organisation’s specific needs.

In March 2006, Cognos and IBM announced a global strategic alliance to help customers integrate their business processes across the enterprise and gain greater insight into business performance. The alliance agreement included joint development, marketing, and sales of SOA-based solutions to help customers optimise their analytics capabilities leveraging industry-specific best practices. For more information, please see http://www.cognos.com/news/releases/2006/0307.html.

About IBM
For more information about IBM, visit www.ibm.com.

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/

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