BURLINGTON, Mass., August 9, 2000—Cognos^® (Nasdaq:COGN; TSE:CSN), the world's largest and most successful business intelligence company, today extended its market leadership in major enterprise accounts, announcing a multi-million dollar global agreement with Employers Reinsurance Corp. (ERC), a GE company.

With 1999 net written premiums of $8.2 billion, Overland Park, Kansas-based ERC is the second largest reinsurance company in the U.S., and the third largest in the world. The Cognos solution deployed at ERC includes multidimensional Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and enterprise reporting and visualization, which is accessible by employees, external customers and business partners via the Cognos business intelligence portal, a web enabled extranet.

The Cognos solution supports GE's Six Sigma quality initiative of delivering near perfect products and services. Six Sigma enables organizations like GE to measure how many "defects" there are in a given process, in order to systematically determine how to eliminate them and get as close to "zero defects" as possible. ERC employees ranging from underwriters to senior executives will be able to access, analyze and report corporate data on key performance indicators such as profit and loss margin, loss ratios, premium volumes and renewal rates against pre-defined quality metrics, thus enabling them to identify areas where productivity and quality can be improved.

Along with the internal application, ERC will also share information with its customers and business partners through a Cognos-driven "Event Trackersm" decision-support Extranet. Customers will access data on relevant activities through the Cognos portal, providing insights on their own business practices and alerting them to any issues that require attention.

"Cognos' provides solutions that dovetail with ERC's e-business initiatives," said Mitchell Habib, ERC's Chief Information Officer. "Cognos has an outstanding track record of success as it deploys quickly and delivers immediate business impact. Cognos gave us a 'quick Web win' that we deployed within a few weeks."

"We're delighted that ERC has adopted Cognos," said Joanne K. Masingill, Cognos senior vice president of marketing. "Cognos is ideally suited to meet this challenge, as evidenced by the key enterprise agreements we've recently been announcing with industry leaders like ERC."