IBM Cognos Now! is MDS Pharma Services' Choice to Drive Greater Visibility into Sales Performance

Business Wire, May 6, 2008

Business intelligence solution provides better understanding of customer data, enabling more informed decision making

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Cognos, an IBM company and world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that MDS Pharma Services has selected IBM Cognos Now! to track and analyze sales performance across its lines of business.

MDS Pharma Services, a leading provider of innovative drug discovery and development solutions for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies worldwide, sought a business intelligence (BI) offering that could tap into its existing customer relationship management (CRM) platform, enabling stronger customer alignment, a better understanding of its customer and opportunity pipeline, and improved decision making capability.

MDS Pharma Services chose IBM Cognos Now!, the industry's first BI solution with a continuous business monitoring appliance designed to help decision makers proactively track, monitor, and respond to continuously updated operational metrics in real-time or near real-time.

"IBM Cognos Now! delivers a BI solution that will significantly enhance our ability to support our clients," said David Spaight, President, MDS Pharma Services. "The automated system will allow our Business Development team to respond to clients more rapidly with deliverables such as quotes and proposals. The multi-dimensional views of our data will give us better insight into client trends and enable us to better anticipate their needs."

Using IBM Cognos Now!, MDS Pharma Services expects to be able to generate greater detail and more sophisticated, up-to-date analysis of their CRM data. Additionally, MDS Pharma Services will use IBM Cognos Now! to quickly access and analyze financial data from its Oracle E-Business Suite application.

IBM Cognos Now! empowers business users through highly visual, interactive and self-service dashboards, analysis and reports to deliver greater insight and faster, better-informed decision making. IBM Cognos Now! is a BI solution focused on delivering continuous business monitoring, prepackaged as an appliance. With IBM Cognos Now!, both enterprise and small-to-midsized companies can easily integrate multiple data sources to deploy and maintain a low-cost BI solution that monitors key business operations metrics. All the software is preconfigured and can be quickly plugged into an organization's existing infrastructure.

"Operational dashboards that monitor critical business operations are being implemented more frequently by organizations to track, monitor, and respond to continuously updated operational metrics in real time," said Leah MacMillan, Vice-President, Product Marketing, Cognos. "Delivered as an appliance, IBM Cognos Now! is fast and easy to deploy, and is the perfect solution for companies that want to get started quickly with an operational BI project. Capitalizing on Cognos, MDS Pharma Services will now be able to respond quickly to changing metrics, gain a holistic view into sales performance, and ultimately drive better decision making in the organization."

Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering performance management software for the pharmaceutical industry. Currently, 25 of the top 30 pharmaceutical firms rely on IBM Cognos BI and 17 of the top 25 firms use IBM Cognos Planning. As well, IBM Cognos software is used by the top 5 biotechnology companies. For more information about IBM Cognos offerings for pharmaceuticals and life sciences, please visit http://www.cognos.com/solutions/industry/ pharmaceuticals-life-sciences/index.html (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.).

About MDS Pharma Services:

MDS Pharma Services, a business unit of MDS Inc. (TSX:MDS; NYSE:MDZ), is committed to delivering quality service on time, and offers a full spectrum of resources to meet the drug discovery and development needs of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. With numerous facilities strategically located around the world, MDS Pharma Services applies advanced scientific and technological expertise throughout the drug discovery and development process - from lead optimization, pre-IND research, early clinical research (bioequivalence, phases I-IIa) and bioanalysis through to global clinical development (phases IIb-IV), central lab and centralized cardiac services. For more information, visit the MDS Pharma Services website at www.mdsps.com.

About Cognos, an IBM company:

Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions. It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008. For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com.

Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks of Cognos ULC (formerly Cognos Incorporated) in the United States and/or other countries. IBM and the IBM logo are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, or other countries, or both. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.