BURLINGTON, MA & DIEGEM, October 12, 2004 - Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced that Proximus, the leading Belgian mobile telephone operator, with its shareholders Belgacom, the leading supplier of global telecommunications solutions on the Belgian market and Vodafone, the largest mobile telecommunications network company in the world, has selected Cognos for its Corporate Performance Management initiative, called PoleStar (Proximus On Line Environment for Scorecarding, Tracking, Analysis & Reporting).

All departments at Proximus supply and exchange huge amounts of information and data, for this reason it is vital to Proximus to ensure that this data is correct and reliable as it is used daily in key business decision making. To trust information, knowledge workers and management must know where it comes from, how it is produced and calculated. Furthermore, it is key that information has the same meaning and definition for everyone in the company. PoleStar will enable all people in the company to work with identified, located, understood, and accurate data to support key decision making.

• PoleStar offers to management a powerful on line solution to continuously keep them informed of Key Performance Indicators, to support the decision making process related to objectives/results and to speed up the correction when negative indicators are highlighted.
• PoleStar also displays the Balanced Scorecard.
• Finally, it also links initiatives, actions, and objectives to the Strategic objectives of the company.

About 200 users currently benefit from the information delivered by PoleStar.

"In today's market, information and corporate performance management can make the difference to competitive success", said Philippe Vander Putten of Proximus. "Proximus was looking for a comprehensive, integrated business intelligence solution that can scale to meet the needs of our wide and diverse user communities. Cognos provides our users with tailor-made information, allowing us to closely track our corporate performance."

The selection happened after an exhaustive review of the solutions available on the market today, including the solutions of several existing Business Intelligence vendors at Proximus. "As with any visionary management team, Proximus' management required the whole range of functionalities that companies are looking for when they start implementing Corporate Performance Management", according to Stijn Vermeulen, Managing Director, Cognos Belgium & Luxembourg. "Corporate Performance Management is more then being able to report of data. Companies are looking for complete solutions with functionality adapted to each category of information users within a company. Cognos' ability to offer an integrated Enterprise Business Intelligence platform, offering scorecarding, management dashboards & visualization, multidimensional analysis, reporting and event detection within one single environment, also made the difference to Proximus."

ABOUT PROXIMUS:

A subsidiary of Belgacom S.A. and of its partner Vodafone S.A., Belgacom Mobile S.A. has since its launch been outstanding as the leading mobile telephone operator in Belgium. On 31 December 2003, Proximus had 4,201,000 active customers* (1,759,000 subscribers and 2,442,000 prepaid customers). As the majority shareholder in Belgacom Mobile S.A, Belgacom S.A. is the leading supplier of global telecommunications solutions on the Belgian market. The world leader in the sector, the American-British group Vodafone holds 25% of the capital of the Belgacom Mobile S.A.

* An active customer is any mobile telephone user who has sent or received a call or sent an SMS message during the last three months.