STORAGE

Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced it has further expanded its investment and commitment to the office of finance by introducing Cognos Controller 2.3 to deliver a single, enterprise-wide view of corporate performance for consistent and reliable management and corporate reporting. With sophisticated global financial consolidation capabilities, Cognos Controller is the first Cognos-branded offering from the company's recent acquisition of Frango. It helps structure and control the process for internal and external reporting made difficult by business changes, compliance requirements driven by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), and disparate systems to provide a transparent, accurate and timely management view of enterprise-wide corporate performance. According to a Dec. 3, 2004 report by IDC analyst Kathleen Wilhide, "Software and the related strategies to handle performance-management processes and consistency in information are becoming mission critical. The pressure to enhance shareholder value by delivering timely external results reporting and to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and IFRS has put the use of software solutions to support these processes high on the corporate agenda. Cognos has made a commitment to providing solutions that complete this vision for financial executives, and it is well positioned with a best-in-class suite of products, coupled with its BI solution, to deliver an integrated, strategic approach to performance management and reporting." Cognos Controller joins the newly updated Cognos Planning Series 7 Version 3, the newly introduced Cognos Plan-to-Perform Blueprints and the Cognos Business Intelligence portfolio as integral elements of a single, enterprise- wide platform for corporate reporting and performance management. This platform is designed to help organizations make consistent and informed business decisions more quickly to drive business performance, while sustaining and supporting regulatory compliance processes globally across the enterprise. "This integrated offering for finance is a compelling proposition for any company that is serious about corporate performance management and business intelligence," said Ross McEwan, Head of Finance & Actuarial Systems, AEGON UK. "Our use of the Controller product has allowed us to consistently produce consolidated reports at the speed our business demands. This capability is complemented by Cognos ReportNet's ability to access, report and analyze business information in a centralized and standard fashion." "We drive our corporate performance through global sales forecasting with support from Cognos Enterprise planning. Key figures in our planning processes need to be integrated with other important data, such as financial and non- financial data that has been reported and processed using the Cognos consolidation solution," said Ola Salmen, Chief Financial Officer of the V&S Group. "The link between these two solutions ensures that we have an overall picture for performance management purposes, as well as the ability to examine a detailed breakdown of key figures. We expect Controller to make a significant contribution to Cognos' CPM offering." Cognos Controller delivers best practice consolidation functionality that compresses the time to close, ensures accuracy and integrity and provides a high level of confidence that the business controls directly impacting the corporate reporting process are effective. The built-in intelligence enables customers to easily and rapidly consolidate their business performance data, decrease implementation times and drive an ongoing lower total cost of ownership. Additional updates included in the new 2.3 version provide deeper integration between Controller and the existing Cognos applications. Single- Sign-On between the applications enables consistent security management for customer's CPM deployments, while new support for traditional Chinese, adds to the more than 40 other languages already supported to further widen the global footprint of the product. Leading organizations in the financial arena across North America partner with Cognos to drive corporate performance initiatives with customers. These firms have participated in early sales training for Cognos Controller and are ready to start delivering the newest Cognos solution to market. They include CBH Consultants, e-Capital Advisors, ISA Consulting, JCB Partners, John Daniel Associates, Inc., Lodestar Solutions, Sky Solutions, Newcomp, Niteo, and The Normandy Group. "CFOs are faced with an important challenge with new compliance pressures and as a result many of them have been forced to delay corporate performance initiatives," said Doug Barton, vice-president, Product Marketing, Cognos Inc. "With the addition of Cognos Controller, Cognos is uniquely suited to partner with customer's to ensure their investments in consolidation and corporate reporting can be effectively tied to a more expansive performance management agenda in a cohesive and cost effective way." Cognos Controller 2.3 is immediately available directly from Cognos or its extensive network of partners.