– Vibrant partner program extends IBM Cognos offerings to deliver greater value for global industry customers –

Sydney, 13 May 2008 – Cognos, an IBM company, and the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced it is aggressively pursuing industry alliances to fuel business growth. Building on the domain expertise offered by its expanding community of partners, Cognos has set its sights on emerging opportunities across all major industry areas, including financial services, public sector, retail and life sciences.

According to a February 2008 Vertical Leadership Survey by IDC, many IT providers cited a lack of appropriate partners as the top business challenge they face in penetrating specific verticals. In fact, only 56 per cent of IT providers surveyed said they had a partner program specifically geared around industry. *

“Partners are a critical part of our industry mandate. Cognos is committed to working with new and existing partners to develop, deliver, and support the industry applications that make our mutual clients more successful,” said David Merchant, Cognos Marketing Manager ANZ. “The expanded scale of Cognos under IBM, working together with our partners, extends our ability to foster the creativity, collaboration, and continuous learning that benefits Cognos, our partners, and especially our joint industry customers.”

Many of Cognos’ partners are capitalising on IBM® Cognos® 8 Business Intelligence, which offers both a foundation for and a proven approach to standardised information delivery and effective performance management. Easy to integrate, deploy and use, IBM Cognos 8 BI delivers a simplified BI environment that drives high user adoption, enables better decision-making, and serves as an enterprise-scale technology foundation for performance management. Partners also rely on IBM Cognos analytics software for financial performance management, including IBM Cognos 8 Planning and IBM Cognos TM1, which provide improved planning, analytics, and "what-if" scenario modeling.

To date, more than 100 joint and Powered by IBM Cognos Software offerings have been delivered to market, enabling customers across all industries to take advantage of Cognos’ open, standards-based business intelligence and performance management platform while harnessing full value from a partner’s industry expertise and specialised knowledge.

More recently, Cognos has teamed with partners to deliver:

Cognos-BearingPoint Program Objective Memorandum (POM) and Budgeting, which is designed to help defence agencies perform top-down and bottom-up planning, budgeting, and forecasting, ensuring that budgets are in line with specific targets and encouraging better analysis of the costs needed to achieve these defined goals.

Cognos-BearingPoint IT Cost Transparency for Financial Services, an analytical reporting capability for CIOs to better understand the true costs of delivering IT services to the business. The service gives the CIO a multi-dimensional view of IT cost, comparing actual performance against budget.

Cognos-Deloitte Consolidation, Controls and Reporting Performance Blueprint, which helps companies across all industries design and implement consolidation and reporting controls in parallel with their IBM Cognos Controller implementation in order to support financial statement controls objectives.

Cognos-ISA Clinical Trials, a Powered by IBM Cognos Software tool that enables pharmaceutical companies to continually monitor clinical trials performance on-the-fly, spot issues that require attention, and take appropriate corrective actions.

Cognos-JCB Partners Retail Performance, a Powered by IBM Cognos Software application which enables retailers to transform data from multiple Point-of-Sale (POS), ERP and supplier systems into a conformed, structured information environment for high-performance analysis, reporting and scorecarding.

Cognos-Parson Consulting Financial Services Performance Management (FSPM), a Powered by IBM Cognos Software offering that provides a powerful way for financial services companies to predict business outcome and adjust quickly to market dynamics. Finance professionals gain the ability to run multiple industry-related, “what-if” scenarios that reflect factors such as changing rates, financial strategy, and competitive scenarios over extended periods of time.

Cognos-Parson Consulting Financial Services Mortgage Accelerator, a Powered by IBM Cognos Software application that allows mortgage lenders to create an income and balance sheet that incorporates major mortgage inputs and enables the lender to make changes to a business driver and understand its impact on the business.

“Our partners offer the rich experience we need to help businesses tackle some of the toughest information-intensive challenges in their industry,” added Merchant. “Our collaborative offerings ultimately furthers our Information on Demand vision, helping IBM Cognos clients expand the value of their information for competitive advantage.”

Additional information about Cognos partner program, including Powered by IBM Cognos Software Program, can be found at http://www.cognos.com/partners/index.html

* - Source: IDC, “A Cross Industry Approach to Industry Planning," Doc # II2008_GSMW, March 2008

About Cognos, an IBM company:

Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions. It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008. For more information visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com.