Cognos Customer Princess Cruises Honored With Business Finance Vision Award

– Princess recognized for its successful transformation of business processes using Cognos Performance Management Solutions –

OLD GREENWICH, Conn. – BPM SUMMIT – October 31, 2006— Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that Princess Cruises has been awarded a 2006 Business Finance Vision Award for its implementation of Cognos’ enterprise planning capabilities.

The Vision Awards recognize excellence in business performance management. Princess Cruises (parent company is Carnival Corporation) was honored in the revenue category of “over $5 Billion” at a gala reception last evening during the Business Performance Management Summit in Greenwich, Conn.

“This year’s Vision Award winners truly represent the bestin business performance management processes and systems, ”said David Blansfield, Group Publisher and Editorial Director for Business Finance magazine. “Princess Cruises took time-consuming, manual, spreadsheet-based processes and transformed them, not only cutting costs and streamlining processes but also facilitating better decisions about resource allocation.

“The cruise line industry is notoriously complex and challenging, serving diverse stakeholder interests,” Blansfield noted. “Princess Cruises used Cognos’ performance management solutions to align strategic and operational plans by measuring, monitoring and optimizing key business drivers. Their implementation is a great example of how performance management can create tangible value and competitive advantage for organizations.”

Princess Cruises is one the world’s most recognizable premier cruise lines, carrying more than a million passengers each year. Since its initial Cognos implementation in 2003, the company has grown its use of Cognos enterprise planning across its business. Princess pulls data into Cognos Planning from its Oracle general ledger system to deliver greater visibility and effectively manage planning processes for human resources, finance, land tour and cruise operations, including food-and-beverage, guest rooms, retail boutiques, casinos and art auctions.

“Cognos performance management plays a crucial role in our organization’s checks and balances,” said Greg Bozigian, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, Princess Cruises. “ Our performance management implementation originated with driver-based planning. This created a foundation for a reliable decision support system which has improved accountability and confidence in the data by involving all the right people in the process to determine key insights that impact the business. We have the ability to create detailed ‘what-if’ scenarios in real-time as material events occur, and quickly report projected impact with the confidence that we are using the same set of assumptions across our business units.”

With Cognos, Princess has reduced data aggregation from days to minutes. Planning, forecasting, and budgeting processes now incorporate qualitative analysis and changes can be made on the fly across the business. With proactive forecasting capabilities for cruise revenues and expenses, Princess can compare the expenses and revenues of similar operations (i.e. two different cruise ships) and see whether one is more efficient or profitable than the other -- then dig deeper into the underlying reasons.

The Cognos solution has also assisted Princess in its SOX 404 and 409 compliance processes. Models are used to verify that budget and forecast data ties to information in financial systems, and administrators can leverage access control to define access rights for users based on their level of responsibility.

“Princess Cruises’ commitment to best-practices and continuous improvement is exemplary,” said Doug Barton, vice-president, product marketing, Cognos. “Like many industry analysts recommend, they began their performance management initiative with budgeting, planning and forecasting. This foundation helps transform performance management practices from slow, expensive and disconnected silos into dynamic, efficient and connected business processes.”

Now in their 10th year, the Vision Awards are the only awards developed specifically to recognize business performance management (BPM), which includes strategic planning, business planning and budgeting, performance measurement and business and financial reporting. In addition to having demonstrated excellence in these processes, award winners have established organizational cultures that support and reinforce best practices in business performance management.

About Business Finance Magazine
Business Finance is a trade magazine about and for senior business and finance executives — CEOs, CFOs, COOs, treasurers, finance directors, etc. Its purpose is to help them do their jobs and make better purchasing decisions. Editorially, Business Finance emphasizes content that anticipates important trends and quantifies their potential impact to its subscribers. Major areas of coverage include performance management, corporate finance, treasury and cash management and technology management.For more information or to subscribe to Business Finance, visit http://www.bfmag.com/subscribe

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.

Contact Information

Carrie Bendzsa

Senior Manager, Public Relations

Cognos

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