Cognos in the future

Some customers see a longer future for PowerHouse than for the HP 3000, propped up by the language’s installed base in the Digital Vax community. Since the Vax’s OpenVMS will live on in the Itanium architecture, PowerHouse should be able to survive, they reason. Pickering said moving out of the 3000 community doesn’t mean that the future will become less costly, though.

“Some see the migration from the 3000 as a chance to escape the Cognos license fees as well,” said the consultant. “Perhaps they haven’t looked at fees for other enterprise-level software — sticker shock may force some alternative migration plans.”

Cognos says that it continues to work on PowerHouse, though few could argue the company’s investment is as significant as Microsoft’s .NET developments, or even Cognos’ own Business Intelligence advances. Cognos’s Berry says that its PowerHouse ADT group still carries its weight inside the company.

“The ADT business is still a formidable business within the walls of Cognos,” he said. “We’re still coming out with new versions, 8.40 in November, and we’re not sitting still.”

Cognos has also been studying a move to support Itanium in its PowerHouse products since last year. Berry believes the company could make an announcement on PowerHouse support for the new HP architecture soon.

“We’re all pushing it hard, and it’s the right place for us to go,” he said. “There’s a lot of committees to work through, once we get all the blessings, hopefully we can make that announcement soon. It’s definitely on our radar screen.”

If Cognos’ prospective enhancements won’t arrive soon enough, or offer a significant advantage, CORE’s offerings represent an alternative. CORE’s Lucky said customers who want to move away from PowerHouse can retain the business logic inside their applications.

“Organizations have invested millions in creating custom business logic in their PowerHouse applications that gives them a competitive advantage,” he said. “Rather than throwing that away, CORE Migration lets them preserve the valuable intellectual property contained within the business rules and logic of legacy PowerHouse applications.”