Cognos Previews Cognos 8 Go! Mobile

Rich client will deliver business intelligence to more users, optimize access to relevant BI information, and enable informed decision-making and higher business productivity

Burlington, MA (PRWEB), September 25, 2006 -— Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today previewed Cognos 8 Go! Mobile, a new BI solution that will bring decision-support information directly to mobile device users for right-time decision making. Cognos 8 Go! Mobile represents Cognos’ next milestone in making BI accessible to more people and enabling higher adoption of business intelligence for enhanced decision making and improved organizational performance.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) delivers easy-to-use BI with the right context, through familiar interfaces, at the right time. To further enable faster and more effective decisions, Cognos offers additional access options that bring BI to familiar working environments of every worker. Cognos 8 Go! Search helps users easily and instantly find strategic BI metrics and information. Cognos 8 Go! Office lets users view, interact with, and refresh Cognos 8 BI reports, analyses, and metrics within Microsoft® Excel®, PowerPoint® and Word. Previewed today, Cognos 8 Go! Mobile will help users make more informed decisions in context to quickly improve individual effectiveness and organizational performance when mobile, while enabling IT to further leverage existing investments in Cognos 8 BI to continue lowering the overall cost of ownership.

Cognos’ innovation continues to impress me. We have been wanting to access Cognos reports via our BlackBerry handsets, and I know once my users see how this can work, they will begin using this functionality every day during their normal course of business

“Mobile device deployment continues to be a top agenda item for most enterprises,” said Jack E. Gold, founder and principal analyst, J. Gold Associates, a strategic analyst firm covering the mobile market. “In fact, in the next three years, 75% of all enterprises are expected to have wireless deployments. Moving beyond e-mail to business critical apps, particularly those allowing better real time decision making, will provide users with a big leap in productivity. Extending BI to mobile users, such as with Cognos 8 Go! Mobile, will enable the workforce to make high value decisions that will greatly enhance enterprise efficiency, and ultimately profits.”

– Cognos 8 Go! Mobile takes business intelligence and productivity to the next level –

Existing BI solutions are limited in the wireless environment because they assume desktop capabilities. For example, users experience difficulties scrolling and expanding cells within a large spreadsheet, lack of BI style interactivity with PDFs, slow download and response times with HTML, or no access at all when out of network coverage. Cognos 8 Go! Mobile leaps past these approaches to deliver a rich mobile-client interface designed for business intelligence that allows anyone to use a handheld device to read and interact with Cognos 8 BI reports and metric information. The user-friendly and intuitive client will also deliver:

• Author once – BI report authors can write a report once, and every user can access it regardless of language, locale or consumption approach (Web, search, mobile, desktop productivity suite, etc.). Cognos 8 Go! Mobile will take care of formatting the data for the device, and IT does not need a separate mobile authoring environment. Employees will gain access to all BI information to make better decisions – not just a subset of arbitrary reports or limited functionality that were re-authored in advance for mobile devices.

• Single security – Cognos 8 Go! Mobile will integrate with and leverage Cognos’ existing security features to deliver a single security environment for all users regardless of how they consume reports. Cognos 8 Go! Mobile security also takes into account the unique challenges associated with mobile devices with theft/loss protection capabilities such as automatic content locking.

• Device-specific navigation –Cognos 8 Go! Mobile is designed to leverage native mobile device functionalities so users can easily and intuitively see, interpret, and interact with the information they need quickly and easily, even when outside wireless coverage for connected and disconnected use.

Cognos and Research In Motion (RIM) have formed a technology alliance to deliver Cognos 8 Go! Mobile to BlackBerry® users worldwide in early 2007. With Cognos 8 Go! Mobile, existing Cognos 8 BI customers will be able to use BlackBerry handsets to further leverage their BI investments and receive information and insight to make business decisions from any location at any time, with little additional investment. Companies that already use BlackBerry handsets for mobile workers will be able to deliver greater value to those employees by providing immediate access to key business information presented in BI reports.

“Enabling Cognos 8 Go! Mobile on the BlackBerry platform will provide a powerful mobile BI solution for our mutual customers,” said Alan Panezic, vice president, BlackBerry Solutions, RIM. “Mobile Business Intelligence can offer clients a powerful edge in business performance, helping them access and focus on key information. We are pleased to be working with Cognos to bring this exciting new innovation to market on BlackBerry.”

“Cognos 8 Go! Mobile is a new way to get BI on the move, and represents an important phase of Cognos’ strategy to increase broad user adoption of BI throughout organizations,” said Leah MacMillan, vice president of product marketing, Cognos. “Cognos 8 Go! Mobile goes way beyond current market offerings and will deliver an unprecedented rich view of key business information, allowing employees to monitor the pulse of business remotely, and enabling them to make decisions remotely. Based on a proven, Web services-based SOA, the Cognos 8 BI platform and Cognos 8 Go! Mobile will bring BI to any user, whether at a desk or in the field, to improve organizational performance.”

“Cognos’ innovation continues to impress me. We have been wanting to access Cognos reports via our BlackBerry handsets, and I know once my users see how this can work, they will begin using this functionality every day during their normal course of business,” said Chris Framel, applications group manager, City of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “The deep functionality is exactly suited for my remote workers’ needs, and our IT department will benefit from this seamless new way of accessing Cognos 8 BI information with zero administration overhead. This type of application not only allows more business users to get their hands on the information they need to improve performance, but it continues to reduce the overall cost of ownership for our BI solution.”

About Cognos:
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.

Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organization’s ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? – and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies.

Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management 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.

Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. The BlackBerry and RIM families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Research In Motion Limited. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Note to Editors:
Copies of previous Cognos press releases and Corporate and product information are available on Cognos' Web site at http://www.cognos.com.

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