STORAGE

Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced that Cognos customer organizations worldwide are successfully extending their PeopleSoft Enterprise applications with Cognos' proven solutions. By combining Cognos and PeopleSoft, these customers are better able to manage business performance through enhanced revenue, profit, asset and risk management. Cognos solutions for PeopleSoft embrace and extend PeopleSoft Enterprise applications to provide customers with a consistent view across multiple business applications through integrated reporting, analysis, scorecarding, planning and analytics that automatically leverage PeopleSoft business content, including security. Cognos customers University of Minnesota, Vail Resorts, and University of Alberta have selected and continue to manage their business performance needs with the tight integration of Cognos BI, Cognos Performance Applications and their PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. With Cognos analysis capabilities on top of its PeopleSoft ERP, the University of Minnesota was able to identify new revenue potential, estimated at $187 million, enable a $5-million cost-recovery and offer a higher quality student experience. "Combining Cognos with PeopleSoft has more than paid for our initial technology investment and has provided us with a means to identify new revenue generators, better plan course offerings, streamline operations and improve efficiencies," said Susan Grotevant, who oversees the school's Information Management System department. "Today, I don't see my job as providing reports, but instead, providing people with the information they need to make informed decisions." "Vail Resorts has used Cognos and PeopleSoft to create a sophisticated labor utilization model that allows us to maximize workforce productivity and manage costs more efficiently," Pat Donovan, Director, Corporate Human Resources, Vail Resorts. "As a result, Vail Resorts was able to reduce medical costs 10% year over year. This is highly unusual in today's health insurance market and the savings are largely due to the labor utilization model. We could not have managed this effectively without the use of an analytic tool like Cognos." Interest in applications to support financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting is currently high -- a recent Forrester survey shows that 35% will invest in this software within the next 12 months. The same Forrester report emphasizes that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance "is increasing investment in financial transparency", citing that "the need for better controls and transparency is also increasing momentum for planning and budgeting systems."* "Four years ago, we brought Cognos BI and PeopleSoft applications together to work with our human resource and student administration reports. In 2004, we added Cognos Planning to further integrate our planning and budgeting processes with our operational budgets," said Philip Stack, director, Resource Planning, University of Alberta. "The combination of Cognos reporting, analysis and planning with PeopleSoft will help us to improve our strategic planning capabilities and to maximize the allocation of our limited resources in support of our institutional strategic priorities." For further information about Cognos solutions for PeopleSoft visit: its Web site. "Cognos continues to deliver sophisticated analytic, reporting and analysis, scorecarding and planning capabilities of strategic value to the PeopleSoft community," said Doug Barton, vice-president, product marketing, Cognos Performance Management. "With our broad solution portfolio, we continue to help companies drive business value, enabling them to leverage multiple ERP and legacy transaction systems to meet current needs, and also safeguard future requirements."