Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced that one of its customers, HypoVereinsbank AG (HVB), the second largest private-sector bank in Germany, has won the Gartner BI Excellence Awards for its BI implementation. The Gartner BI Excellence Awards highlight world-class Business Intelligence initiatives. After achieving finalist status from the Gartner Business Intelligence analyst research team, HVB presented details of its "Active Credit Portfolio Management (ACPM)" implementation, leveraging Cognos' business intelligence software, in front of a live audience of 685 attendees at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2006. Conference attendees selected HVB as the winning case study, over two other award finalists. Gartner announced HVB as the BI Excellence Awards winner at a ceremony on February 7, 2006. The criteria Gartner used in evaluating award candidates included: * Magnitude of business benefits achieved; * How "core" or "mission-critical" to the business was the implementation; and * Successfully completing components from Gartner's "Cornerstones of Business Intelligence Excellence." With Cognos, HVB was able to develop a new business model to more effectively manage corporate loan portfolios based on market pricing models and credit derivatives. As a result, HVB is able to avoid large risks, diversify risk, optimize the risk/return profile, and generate additional income. "Winning the Gartner BI Excellence Awards is a great honor, and we are proud of the talented individuals on our team who have made this project so successful," said Eckart Schroeer, director, head of information management, HypoVereinsbank AG. "In addition to redesigning our business models, we revolutionized our technology infrastructure with Cognos. The Cognos solutions enabled us to evolve our business and position us for growth in an exploding market environment." "We are glad to have been able to contribute to HVB's triumph as the winner of the Gartner BI Excellence Awards," said Dave Laverty, senior vice president of marketing, Cognos. "With our simplified BI environment, Cognos enables broad user adoption and serves as an enterprise foundation for performance management. We will continue to provide leading organizations such as HVB groundbreaking solutions that drive and improve corporate performance." In addition, Gartner recently positioned Cognos in the Leaders Quadrant of both the recent Business Intelligence Platforms Magic Quadrant and Corporate Performance Management Suites Magic Quadrant. View these reports at http://www.cognos.com/news/analyst_reviews.html.