New Cognos Consolidation and Reporting Solution Provides Best Practices for Finance Departments Worldwide

Cognos® (NASDAQ: COGN) (TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today extended its financial performance management leadership by introducing a new performance blueprint, the Group Consolidation and Corporate Reporting (GCCR) Blueprint, designed to help finance departments renew and improve the close, consolidate and report process through industry best-practices. Finance departments worldwide face continuous pressure to deliver efficient and accurate financial and regulatory reports as well as support the appropriate systems and processes to drive better performance. Many departments are challenged by a lengthy, or inefficient, close process with multiple manual steps and checkpoints. For these departments, collecting and verifying data is challenging, as is processing consolidations such as minority interest, currency, multiple GAAP and regulatory reports. Financial statements are delivered just in time, with little time available for analysis or review. These issues are particularly challenging for European Union countries where legislation such as the Transparency Directive, is driving the acceleration in reporting timeframes and demanding increased certification of final results. This puts enormous pressure on systems to support these requirements. The new GCCR Performance Blueprint helps customers address the challenge of facilitating continuous performance improvement practices while efficiently meeting the demands of compliance and external reporting under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The blueprint is specifically designed to support organizations that are required report under IFRS guidelines, and provides a financial consolidation foundation system to support additional regulatory and management reporting. Enterprises such as Austrian-based Falkensteiner (FMTG), a leading hotel and tourism group, have deployed Cognos 8 Controller 8.2 to manage their close, consolidation, and reporting process, and are taking advantage of the best practices and reporting capabilities of the GCCR Blueprint to ensure they are aligning resources and making process improvements while meeting regulatory guidelines. "We use Cognos 8 Controller 8.2 to reduce our close cycle times. The new solution augments this efficiency and will assist Falkensteiner’s finance department in ensuring company accounts across the organization are reliable, transparent and can be easily compared for the purposes of adhering to European directives and mandates for reporting,” said Mag. Johann Pinterits, Corporate Director Administration and IT for FMTG. "The blueprint will play a role in accelerating our time to success and lay the foundation for continually renewing and improving our close, consolidate and report process.” Cognos 8 Controller is a finance-owned solution with out of the box functionality that enables users to deploy and manage the financial consolidation process. Developed by the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management™, Cognos’ Group Consolidation and Corporate Reporting Blueprint augments the Cognos 8 Controller solution by providing templates for IFRS and EU specific processes, including for example a standard chart of accounts, dimensionality for segment reporting, and rules for acquisition calculations and currency conversion. Customers can modify and adapt the blueprint to suit their specific consolidation requirements. "Too often, financial performance information is not timely enough for corporate reporting or for business decision-makers to use effectively,” said Doug Barton, vice president, product marketing, Cognos. "Since the European Union made the Transparency Directive mandatory, organizations have been challenged with updating systems and facilitating process improvements to comply with the mandate. Our new Performance Blueprint provides a best practices guide to achieve these process improvements and meet reporting compliance.” About Cognos Performance Blueprints: Cognos offers a full suite of Performance Blueprints to address planning and performance management process areas that directly impact an organization’s ability to create business value. Both functional and industry-specific process areas can now be automated, streamlined and transformed to help organizations quickly create more business value. Developed by the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management, the Cognos Performance Blueprints are a key component within the Cognos Performance Management System, which combines technology, best practices, analytical applications and solutions, and a broad network of partners into a single performance management solution. For further information on the Cognos Performance Blueprints see http://www.cognos.com/innovationcenter/blueprint.html. 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. Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Note to Editors: Copies of previous Cognos press releases and Corporate and product information are available on Cognos' Web site at http://www.cognos.com