New Cognos Performance Solution Helps Pharmaceutical Companies Optimize Sales Quota Management

Cognos® (NASDAQ: COGN) (TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced the launch of a new performance solution designed to help pharmaceutical companies more effectively determine and manage territorial sales quotas that are in line with corporate revenue objectives. According to Gartner: "Few organizations have aggressively explored the potential strategic benefits -- that is, increasing their understanding of the effectiveness of compensation strategies, and the interrelationships among compensation, territories and quotas in securing sustained improvements in sales performance. Moreover, at various points during the project planning and execution life cycles, measures should be adopted to sustain awareness, focus and commitment to capitalizing information as a strategic resource. At the same time, technological options should be explored for potential contributions to efforts." * The Cognos Sales Quota Allocation Blueprint provides a performance management framework that helps pharmaceutical companies strike the right balance of revenue targets that reflect each territory’s unique market characteristics in order to effectively meet organization-wide sales and profitability goals. The Blueprint offers incentive compensation analysts and sales managers enhanced visibility into their distributed sales management processes, ensuring each sales force is maximizing revenues by focusing on the right mix of products for their territory, and is working towards the most appropriate performance incentives. Using out-of-the-box functionality from Cognos 8 Planning and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) – including dashboards, analytical reports and a pre-configured data model – and encompassing pharmaceutical industry best practices, the Cognos Sales Quota Allocation Blueprint lets pharmaceutical companies: visualize historical outcomes and project future sales quota attainment using intuitive dashboards forecast and model the optimal weighting of key sales quota drivers, from which regional sales management can customize quota plans based on local market conditions set future sales quotas based on the most historically accurate business driver weightings consolidate disparate quotas across the organization to create a single view of sales performance objectives shift scarce resources across territories to address changes in internal or external factors impacting market conditions enable accountability, eliminate the use of distributed spreadsheets and remove manual reconciliations through automated audit trails and powerful workflow management "Managing salesforce quota can be a complex undertaking, particularly in large, enterprise pharmaceutical organizations with hundreds or thousands of sales people across different territories, each focusing on a different array of products they need to bring to market. Without an effective quota allocation system, pharmaceutical companies are at risk of missing new sales opportunities, adjusting to new market conditions, and meeting bottom line corporate objectives,” said Susan Gold, vice president of industry marketing and solutions, at Cognos. "The Cognos Sales Quota Allocation Blueprint offers our customers the tools they need to ensure sales quotas are allocated fairly, aligned with revenue objectives, and completed in a timely manner, freeing up management’s time to focus on driving revenues and profitability.” Available immediately to customers, the Cognos Sales Quota Allocation Blueprint is the fourth pharmaceutical solution launched in the past year and a half. The Cognos Clinical Trial Enrollment Forecasting Blueprint, launched in September 2007, together with the Cognos Clinical Trial Forecasting Blueprint, launched in May 2006, enables customers to seamlessly update financial projections as their enrollment projections evolve, helping them better understand the cost of changes and the Dollar effect of enrollment projections. Rounding out current pharmaceutical offerings is the Cognos Sample Optimization Blueprint, also launched in May 2006, and designed to help organizations build optimal sample distribution strategies that take into account current market conditions, field level information, inventory plans, and other corporate goals. Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering performance management solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. Currently, 25 of the top 30 pharmaceutical firms rely on Cognos performance management software, including Novartis, Bayer UK, and Quintiles Transnational. For more information about Cognos solutions for pharmaceuticals and life sciences, please visit www.cognos.com/lifesciences * -- Source: "Sales Incentive Compensation Management Achieves Operational Benefits, but Must Focus on Strategic Value” Michael Dunne, Gartner, 5 April 2007 About Cognos Performance Blueprints: Cognos offers a full suite of Performance Blueprints to address planning and performance management process areas that directly impact an organization’s ability to create business value. Both functional and industry-specific process areas can now be automated, streamlined and transformed to help organizations quickly create more business value. Developed by the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management, the Cognos Performance Blueprints are a key component within the Cognos Performance Management System, which combines technology, best practices, analytical applications and solutions, and a broad network of partners into a single performance management solution. For further information on the Cognos Performance Blueprints see http://www.cognos.com/innovationcenter/blueprint.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 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. 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 the Cognos Web site at www.cognos.com.