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ORLANDO, Fla., COGNOS PARTNER SUMMIT-- Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today recognized its key channel partners with Pinnacle Partner Awards for their roles in the company's ongoing channel sales success in North America. Presented at Cognos' 2003 Partner Summit in Orlando, FL, partners were recognized for their success with the Cognos solution based on understanding of the technology, sales performance, and value-add. Partners were recognized in the following two categories: Top Solution Providers and Top OEM/VAR Partners. Solution providers receiving the Pinnacle Partner Award included: -- CD Group (www.cdgroup.com) -- Creative Computing (www.creatcomp.com) -- Exinom (www.exinom.com) -- ISA Consulting (www.isaconsulting.com) -- Insightformation (www.insightformation.com) -- John Daniel Associates (www.johndaniel.com) -- Merador (www.merador.com) -- Newcomp Solutions (www.newcomp.com) -- The Normandy Group (www.thenormandygroup.com) -- Sky Solutions (www.skysolutions.com) OEM/VAR partners receiving the Pinnacle Partner Award included: -- Deltek (www.deltek.com) -- Manugistics (www.manugistics.com) -- Onyx Software (www.onyx.com) -- SABA (www.saba.com) -- SUNGARD Pentamation (www.pentamation.com) -- SSA Global Technologies (www.ssagt.com) -- Ultimate Software (www.ultimatesoftware.com) "Through these successful partnerships, Cognos is able to extend the delivery of our industry-leading solutions," said Ted Jandl, Cognos vice president of strategic partners. "We are pleased to honor them not only for their high levels of sales success, but also for helping customers derive value and benefits from our solutions across various industries, applications, and geographic locations. These winners have proven that they can deliver a high level of excellence and will remain an integral part of our overall company success." "With Cognos, we are helping customers better manage business cycles and delivering faster and higher return on investment," said David Doucette, CEO of Creative Computing. "The combinations of our respective solutions and innovative practices have helped enable clients to better understand their business, to make informed decisions quickly, and to create a competitive advantage. It is a unique and powerful combination of technologies from Cognos and Creative Computing that has contributed to our joint success." "Cognos is and will be central to our strategy as we continue to grow our data warehousing consulting practice. We are very excited about being recognized for our success," said Gary Shiller, Sky Solutions Vice President. "Sky Solutions identifies the best-of-breed products and partners with companies, such as Cognos, to help our customers get a complete business intelligence solution that improves their bottom-line business results. By combining high quality implementation and services through understanding industry demands, we can deploy scalable, results-oriented data warehousing solutions tailored to our clients' needs." "Deltek is honored to not only partner with the world's leading companies, but also to be recognized with this prestigious award," said Shimi Minhas, Product Director, Business Intelligence at Deltek. "We share a common vision of providing measurable value to our customers. Undoubtedly, the powerful blend of Deltek's consulting and implementation expertise and Cognos' best-of- breed solutions provides our global clients with the answers necessary to gain a competitive, sustainable advantage." The Cognos channel program supplies partners with the support and technology they require in order to be successful, including end-to-end technical and product support, product maintenance, and product training. In addition, the programs deliver a variety of business development tools and resources, including sales and marketing materials. In addition, Cognos today announced the winners of their Partner Achievement Awards, which honor three partner-customer teams who are delivering, implementing, and using corporate performance management to demonstrate business value and return on investment.