COGNOS ANNOUNCES BETA VERSION OF REALOBJECTS

NEW APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT WILL FOCUS ON BUILDING APPLICATION
SERVICES LAYER OF MULTI-TIER APPLICATIONS

BURLINGTON, MA, MAY 21, 1996 -- Cognos (NASDAQ: COGNF;TSE:CSN) today
announced that it has started beta testing RealObjects, a new development
environment for building the class of component-based Microsoft Windows 95
and NT applications that provide competitive advantage to line-of-business
organizations. Geared toward the business developer, RealObjects
incorporates pre-built customizable business templates that define data
structures, common processing behavior, inheritance links and techniques,
and make sophisticated application development easy. RealObjects allows
the business developer to work at a business level rather than an object
implementation level, so distributed applications can be created and
modified rapidly in response to fast-changing business needs. RealObjects
is specialized for building the application services (middle) layer of
multi-tier applications rather than the user services (GUI) or data
services (RDBMs) layers. Application services are where a business creates
differentiated value by encapsulating its own proprietary business rules
and processes.

"Businesses gain competitive advantage through applications that respond in
a unique way to customers and markets, so the application services layer
is where businesses create the highest competitive value," said Bob
Thompson, director of market development for Cognos' application
development tools division. "Today this class of application is
laboriously crafted by armies of C++ programmers. By making objects and
components easy, RealObjects will make competitive applications more
accessible, allowing business developers who are less specialized as
programmers but more attuned to business requirements to deliver a similar
level of sophistication."

RealObjects will be available to a select group of users as part of an
Early Adopters program this summer, and is slated for release later this
year.

Cognos is an established market leader in application development tools for
businesses seeking operational excellence, with Axiant 4GL, a visual
development environment for migrating core business systems to
client/server, and PowerHouse, a leading server-based development
environment. In addition, Cognos' industry-leading business intelligence
tools, Impromptu and PowerPlay, provide the business world with easy
access to corporate data and turn that data into information to support
the decision-making process.

Cognos develops, markets and supports -- both directly and through
resellers worldwide -- client/server tools for data access, data analysis
and application development on a wide range of open and proprietary
computing platforms. Cognos is a publicly held company with dual
headquarters in Ottawa, Canada and Burlington, MA. Cognos' World Wide Web
address is http://www.cognos.com.

Note to Editors: Copies of previous Cognos press releases and Corporate and
product information are available on Cognos' World Wide Web (WWW) site, at
http://www.cognos.com and at PR Newswire's site at
http://www.prnewswire.com. Product and company information can also be
found at the Cognos CompuServe forum (GO COGNOS).
 
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