After 13 years of providing top-flight support for Adager and the IMAGE database users in the 3000 community, Ken Paul has become an independent consultant offering a variety of services for HP 3000 sites. Paul (303.694.0920, KenRPaul@concentric.net), who logged long hours helping database administrators use Adager to repair databases and recover from disasters both natural and otherwise, has been providing support for the customers using the products of Genesee Software for the last 18 months, taking over to aid in the Y2K transition after Genesee founder Gordon Croston died unexpectedly. Genesse’s products include Maui Mail and Maui Manager; the latter is an online spoolfile manager and report viewer.

As we went to press, Paul was conducting a survey to discover which kinds of licenses were most common among the 3000 community’s PowerHouse customers — and looking for ways to give them some relief from the latest upgrade costs. He’s offering transition services to help users of Cognos’ Quiz eliminate the upgrade charges Cognos is assessing when customers purchase the new A-Class and N-Class HP 3000 computers. Some customers are reporting that Cognos’ first quotes on upgrade fees for the new e3000s include the phrase “No Equity for Exiting Software,” meaning they’ll be buying their Cognos products all over again when moving to the A-Class and N-Class systems. Unofficial quotes for PowerHouse licenses start at $12,500 for a full development license on the $16,000 A400, and $18,000 for Quiz-only on the A500, whose list price is just under $37,000. The steep charges are something Paul hopes will motivate customers to move over to the DataNow! reporting package while dropping use of PowerHouse Quiz.

Paul said in an Internet posting about his Quiz services, “By moving to DataNOW!, HP e3000 users can get away from the Cognos pricing issues and also obtain a better report writer that allows the average user to be able to look at the data within their IMAGE databases on their own and possibly produce their own reports instead of having to become a Quiz expert.” The vast majority of respondents to his survey were using full development licenses, the most costly of Cognos license arrangements.

Meanwhile over at Adager, CEO Rene Woc reported the company was literally up to the minute on its support call backlog in the weeks following Paul’s transition.“One of the things we’ve always aimed for is to have the software take care of the front line,” Woc said. “We’re in the call avoidance business.” Alfredo Rego of Adager said Paul’s new venture “includes consulting work that Ken will continue to do for Adager R&D as well as Adager’s referrals for Ken’s Consulting Center whenever HP e3000 customers contact us for assignments.” Rego added that Paul is available “as a TurboIMAGE consultant, as a TurboIMAGE internals instructor, as an Adager instructor, and as a TurboIMAGE repair specialist.”

Paul said his audit and diagnostic consulting “includes a database audit which checks the health and efficiency of your databases. This audit can be done on-site, via modem, or you can send your databases to me for loading and analysis on my system. I have been doing IMAGE database diagnostics and repair work for the last 10-plus years. I am familiar with DIOGENES from HP, Bradmark’s DBGENERAL, and of course Adager. I also have many other tools at my disposal to determine the extent of a problem and also the time it will take to fix the problem. I prefer to work with Adager, and can get a demo copy which has full functionality.” He adds that some IMAGE database problems can be corrected quite easily, “and others may be very severe. We won’t know what we are dealing with until a complete diagnostic is run.”