PHILADELPHIA (BusinessWire EON) September 11, 2007 -- Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, continues to extend its pharmaceutical market leadership, announcing today the launch of a new performance solution designed to help pharmaceutical companies better anticipate and manage patient enrollment requirements to ensure clinical trials successfully comply with FDA requirements.

Clinical trials represent one of the biggest direct-spend components in most pharmaceutical R&D budgets. Failure to enroll adequate numbers of patients is a primary reason why some clinical trials fail. The Cognos Clinical Trial Enrollment Forecasting Blueprint offers the robust forecasting and enrollment analytics pharmaceutical companies need to help ensure adequate patient participation in their clinical trials. The Blueprint maximizes insights into enrollment indicators that can affect the progress of a costly study, and facilitates collaboration between managers, analysts and individual investigator sites to make the necessary adjustments that strike the right balance between cost and performance.

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 Clinical Trial Enrollment Forecasting Blueprint lets managers:

Capitalize on an advanced forecasting data model that calculates and presents for analysis a range of metrics, including planned vs. actual enrollment windows, site activations, and screen failure percentages
Drill into portfolio reports to undertake more detailed analyses of trial enrollment and performance, using up-to-date information from multiple transactional and planning systems
Forecast the impact of ‘on-the-fly’ changes using ‘What if’ planning and scenario analysis. Changes to one enrollment assumption automatically recalculates all of the impacted data instantly, eliminating the need for off-line number crunching and facilitating faster decision-making
Easily adjust business rules to best suit current trial management needs and adapt to sudden changes. New assumptions and rules can be quickly configured, tested and pushed out to end-users and analysts without requiring costly developers and complex coding
View the clinical site hierarchy through a powerful workflow capability that consolidates, in real time, data from the individual investigator-site level up through regions and countries

Available immediately to customers, the Cognos Clinical Trial Enrollment Forecasting Blueprint is the third pharmaceutical solution launched in the past year. Together with the Cognos Clinical Trial Forecasting Blueprint, launched in May 2006, the Blueprints enable 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. The Cognos Sample Optimization Blueprint, also released in May 2006, rounds out current pharmaceutical offerings.

“Customer-designed or commercial Clinical Trials Management Systems often lack the flexibility and forecasting capability pharmaceutical companies require to model the entire enrollment picture across the development portfolio. Spreadsheets do not offer a viable alternative as they can introduce substantial control risks and do not incorporate enterprise-class functionality such as managed workflow, and the ability to push template changes out to hundreds of users simultaneously,” said Bill Stevens, associate vice president of life sciences at Cognos. “The Cognos Clinical Trial Enrollment Blueprint offers an approach that eliminates typical concerns of data integrity and information silos. Managers gain ‘right-time’ visibility into the enrollment status of their study portfolio, enabling them to define, manage and measure critical performance indicators in an efficient and timely manner.”

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.

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.

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