Cognos Builds on Performance Management Vision
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Raises bar with strengthened PM system and announces new accelerators for customer success
BURLINGTON, MA, December 11, 2007 - Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN) (TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today extended its leadership in performance management for customers worldwide - highlighting a series of successes and announcing new accelerators for achieving performance management excellence.
With more than 17 years of proven experience in performance management, Cognos is the only vendor to provide a single, proven software platform with key performance management capabilities including reporting and analysis, planning and forecasting, consolidation, dashboarding, and scorecarding. Whether a large or mid-sized organization, customers can track key metrics, see data and understand trends, and set and share a common view of the future.
"Six years ago, we articulated a vision enabling and engaging everyone in an organization with managing performance in a systemic way. Over the next two years, we invested in building the technology platform for performance management. And most recently, we defined the 'sweet spots' where performance management has the highest impact and offered customers pre-built solutions," said Rob Ashe, Cognos CEO. "Our goal now is to set the market pace with a complete performance management system that enables both operational and financial performance management, underpinned with a market leading business intelligence solution."
New Cognos initiatives and solutions designed to accelerate performance management include:
Integration of Applix TM1 Solutions: Cognos is extending leadership in the financial performance management domain with integration product roadmap milestones for Applix TM1 outlined today in a related announcement.
The Innovation Center On-Line Community: A customer collaboration tool will be available to the Cognos customer community beginning this month. The tool will provide a secure and trusted area for the Cognos innovation center members to interact with other members, thought leaders and Innovation Center experts. It will also provide an on-demand environment for members to access thought leadership articles, case studies, and business process content, share ideas and collaborate on performance management-related best practices.
New Cognos Blueprints: The Strategic Finance Performance Blueprint and The Sales Quota Allocation Blueprint for Life Sciences were released today in related announcements. See cognos.com/news/releases/2007/1211-4.html and http://cognos.com/news/releases/2007/1211-5.html.
Performance Manager for Life Science Book: Latest in Cognos' business book series outlines an organizational-wide performance management framework designed with information 'sweet spots' specific to Life Sciences.
Cognos will also unveil the next evolution of the company's performance management software in January featuring advances in Cognos 8 that will give customers additional critical components required to accelerate improved business performance.
Several analysts and industry experts have sited performance management as a key to improving operations, business planning, and profits. One of Sweden's largest financial management companies, Folksam, adopted a full Cognos performance management solution in 2003. The company once spent 60% of its planning time collecting and consolidating data from SAP R/3, other system sources and business managers, and only 40% actually using the information for planning and analysis. Implementing Cognos 8 Planning as part of its performance management solution enabled Folksam to change these figures to 15% collecting and consolidating and 85% focusing on productive, future-oriented work. Now more than 750 employees use Cognos business intelligence, planning and scorecarding capabilities on a daily basis for decision-making on market trends, scenario planning and forecasting work, calculating revenue and cost balance sheets, sales planning and risk management.
"With our performance management solution, we have a simple and quick environment that can handle all our needs and give us insight into operating costs per cost center and product, sales in relation to the budget, internal purchasing support, premiums paid and disbursed insurance sums," said George Janson, Business Intelligence Coordinator, Controller Division, Folksam. "We've increased our reliability and reduced the time spent on operations from 66 hours to 3 hours. In the long run this means we'll save substantial time and money thanks to the Cognos solution. We're now able to focus 85% of our attention on strategic initiatives that help drive our business."
Other hallmarks of Cognos innovation and performance management leadership to-date include:
The Cognos Innovation Center:
Since it was first launched in 2004 to build a community of like-minded, forward- thinking individuals in finance and IT focused on improving planning and PM practices within their organizations, the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management:
Now boasts more than 3,000 members representing over 500 organizations made up of Cognos customers and partners.
Has released more than 30 industry and functional Performance Blueprints, which are pre-built planning templates to help customers jump-start their deployment to achieve rapid time-to-value while minimizing risk.
Partnership Strength
Cognos' performance management leadership is also supported and extended by a strong partner network, including technology partners, value added resellers, OEMs, more than 70 Powered by Cognos Solutions and global strategic alliances featuring industry leaders including IBM, Accenture, and Deloitte.
Thought Leadership Authoring:
The Cognos Performance Manager book has a broad readership with 30,000 copies distributed, and has been translated into nine languages since its first publication in January 2007. A second edition of the book is slated for release in early 2008.
Industry Recognition:
Cognos and Cognos customers continue to received numerous awards in recognition of their commitment to performance management excellence including the 2007 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the Ventana Research Performance Management Leadership Award the InformationWeek 500 and induction into the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame.
Cognos has received continued recognition from industry analysts firms as a leader in performance management solutions. More information can be found at http://cognos.com/news/performance-management-
industry-analyst-reports.html.
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 www.cognos.com.
Copies of previous Cognos press releases and Corporate and product information are available on the Cognos Web site at www.cognos.com.
