BURLINGTON, MA, October 26, 2004—Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced it is positioned in the visionary quadrant of Gartner, Inc.'s new Corporate Performance Management Magic Quadrant*.

Gartner defines CPM as the methodologies, metrics, processes and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise.

"Our strategic vision and broad-based offering in the key CPM entry-point markets of BI and Finance continues to resonate well with customers. Increasingly, large companies are putting CPM on their strategic agendas," said Dave Laverty, senior vice-president, Global Marketing, Cognos Inc. "We consider being positioned in the visionary quadrant is further testament to the award-winning quality and continued innovation of our products, and the strength of our corporate performance management strategy, which is further advanced through our acquisition of Frango for global financial consolidation."

According to Gartner, "visionaries have a clear vision of market direction and are focused on doing that, but they can still improve in terms of optimizing service delivery."

The Cognos CPM solution aligns execution with strategy across organizations. It is based on the strength of the Cognos Enterprise BI Series, the industry's most comprehensive business intelligence solution, combined with the Cognos Enterprise Planning Series, its industry-leading solution for planning, budgeting, modeling, and forecasting, and Cognos Metrics Manager, the most robust and flexible enterprise scorecarding solution.

One facet of the Cognos vision for CPM includes the company-wide CPM@Cognos initiative which helps the company manage its business performance more effectively using the Cognos CPM solution. This process provides a valuable perspective on CPM that can further be applied towards identifying and meeting Cognos customers' performance management needs.

Through this initiative, Cognos focuses on achieving top-level performance across the company. This effort has made Cognos a world-class example of corporate performance management in action and contributes to its sustained leadership position in the market. The company's achievements in this area were recently recognized by the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, which named Cognos to its Hall of Fame on Oct. 13.
See: http://www.cognos.com/news/releases/2004/1014.html

About the Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted October 2004 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendor's measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Cognos
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management, delivers software that helps companies drive, monitor and understand corporate performance.

Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage - Corporate Performance Management (CPM) - achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale. Our integrated CPM solution helps customers drive performance through planning; monitor performance through scorecarding; and understand performance through business intelligence.

Cognos serves more than 22,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos enterprise business intelligence solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.

*Source: "Magic Quadrant for CPM Suites: No Dramatic Movement in 2004", B. Wood, F. Buytendijk, L. Geishecker, October 14, 2004