December 2004

PowerHouse migration options open to Java

Expanded distribution and new suite assist moves off 4GL

A rapid programming language that was built to speed up HP 3000 development has begun to endure efforts to save time migrating away from it. Sites that use PowerHouse can find a new range of resources as well as fresh outlets for tools that promise to migrate customers off the language. The efforts are surfacing even as some customers swear loyalty to PowerHouse, putting the language into their plans on non-3000 platforms.

Software such as PowerHouse represents a hook that can keep companies on the HP 3000 as well as a path away from the platform. At the same time that the language’s creators make new versions to run on non-3000 platforms, other software companies release tool suites to eliminate what some see as a proprietary element in their IT picture.

Companies which built systems around these fourth generation languages (4GLs) often remain steadfast to the code, since it contains years of business-specific intelligence. But with the advent of the HP 3000’s transition era, these 4GLs have been ported to Windows and Unix. Customers who need to move away from the 3000 can either move their code to a non-3000 version of PowerHouse, or migrate away from a 4GL altogether.

Until recently, the latter option was an entirely manual process. But now the PowerHouse community can choose from a pair of partially automated tool suites. A European company recently began to sell StrongHold, a set of tools that take PowerHouse code 90 percent of the way to a Java re-implementation. The final 10 percent of the project is fine-tuned by hand.

That 90/10 rule remains a common limit for PowerHouse migration tools. Last year Core Migration offered the same level of automation in its product that moves away from PowerHouse. This year the company announced distribution deals with HP Platinum migration partners MB Foster and Speedware. The agreements help to place the Core suite at migration sites where the partners are helping HP 3000 customers move off the platform.

Speedware Ltd. has been expanding its presence in the migration tools sector since 2003, creating its own DBMotion database migrator and purchasing the AMXW migration suite. In one of the sharpest competitive moves of the year, the company, which offers its own Speedware 4GL, is now selling a tool to take customers off of competitor Cognos’s PowerHouse 4GL.

“The tools produce high quality .NET and Java applications that maintain all of the functionality of the original PowerHouse applications,” said Garry Ciambella, Speedware’s VP of R&D. Christine McDowell, Manager of Strategic Partnerships, added that “this relationship allows us to provide further guidance and migration expertise to our customers, as well as to the entire PowerHouse community.”

At MB Foster, the Platinum partner’s motivation to offer Core’s tools is tied to helping Amisys healthcare software users take steps away from their HP 3000 version of Amisys. Creator Amisys Synertech has also used the Core tools, but it also needed that hands-on fine-tuning to complete stepping away from PowerHouse.

“I only see it as an 80 percent solution,” said MB Foster’s president Birket Foster. “If you ask the Amisys people what they’re using Core Migration for, they’ll say they’re doing a chunk of what they need to move to Java, and then [Amisys] is shipping the application code off to India to get the rest of the work done.”

A 2.0 version of the Core Workbench rolled out this summer, promising Java or .NET code with one line for every line of migrated PowerHouse code. “We keep it in our quiver in case someone says they don’t want to use PowerHouse anymore,” Foster said, “and they want to work in Java — because Java doesn’t belong to anybody.”

New tool emerges

Last month news surfaced about a new tool to convert PowerHouse code to Java. StrongHold has been developed and marketed by Dutch firm Brains2B, headed by developer Dennis Groenendijk. He told consultants and customers on a PowerHouse mailing list that StrongHold is on the market to help companies which have already decided they need to move from 4GLs back to a third-generation language (3GL).

Groenendijk has wrapped his solution around Java. “I came up with a solution to ease the transition,” he said, one which will “use open standards and a well thought-out framework in which the Java code could run.” He added that StrongHold is designed to create “readable Java code and a completely transparent framework to ease further development and maintenance — thus making it cheaper and easier to move to a 3GL.”

StrongHold’s Web page references a success story from European leasing company Arval PHH, but that firm moved its PowerHouse apps from a Digital VAX VMS system, not an HP 3000. Despite the lack of a 3000 reference, HP 3000 shop Great Falls Schools will be investigating StrongHold for its move away from the 3000 in a few years.

Declining community

PowerHouse customers such as those at Great Falls are like many others in the IT world, being nudged from legacy to commodity solutions by vendors eager to narrow their choice of playing fields. Great Falls has used PowerHouse for 25 years, but the 4GL’s days may be numbered there.

“We are planning to migrate to the Windows environment with SQL Server,” said veteran systems analyst Georgia Miller. “We are in the process of deciding what development tools we want to use on Windows.”

Miller said she is evaluating whether PowerHouse can stay in the school’s new Windows environment or if the 4GL must go. The Cognos product Axiant gives her an option to migrate data and PowerHouse source code quickly from the HP 3000. “Axiant does give you a great tool to migrate your data to SQL Server,” she said. “By the end of a two-day class I had one of my existing applications working in PowerHouse for Windows.”

But PowerHouse for Windows, she said, runs on the PC platform under DOS, and so it “shows that it was not intended to be a product that was meant to be sold to new users, but just pacify the existing [PowerHouse] users until [Cognos] could do something better.”

Cognos replies that it never intended to give Quick a Windows GUI front-end “because we already had Axiant,” said product manager Bob Deskin. “They can move to Windows without having to do a major re-training effort. They can then decide whether they want to move to an Axiant GUI later.”

Miller has pushed PowerHouse to new horizons at the schools, transforming their submit screens to allow Quiz reports to be converted to Acrobat PDF files and sent to a server. Since Great Falls selected Windows as its migration target, all of its new solutions, including PowerHouse, will have to run in that environment

But the 4GL’s base of expertise is dwindling, especially in remote locations like Great Falls, Montana. Miller said all three of the school’s PowerHouse experts will be retiring within a few years.

The school’s Quiz, QTP and Quick code “could all move right across easily to the PC environment,” Miller said. “But do we want to go in that direction, when there are so many great tools out there for the PC? Our skills in PowerHouse will be going away.”

Many PowerHouse customers are sticking with the language even in the face of HP’s forced march away from the 3000. Some might not be able to stick, for reasons of geography like Great Falls’ situation, or retirement of key programmers.

“We don’t know if we want to go to Java or will have that need,” Miller said. “But the information on StrongHold helps me greatly in my search for what is out there to accomplish our migration.”

Internal migration

PowerHouse customers are vocal about the shortcomings in the vendor’s strategy for the language. They regularly complain about a loss of focus on the product since the heyday of PowerHouse 10 or more years ago. Cognos will discontinue development of its AS/400 and VAX VMS versions of PowerHouse in February. HP is stepping out of the 3000 market where the language first made its debut and matured.

Options to move to other PowerHouse platforms present a better-known and less costly migration, according to one HP 3000 migration company. “We recommend that our customers first look at the PowerHouse to PowerHouse path when considering the migration of PowerHouse applications,” said Transformix president Charles Finley. “In our experience, migrating from PowerHouse on MPE/iX to Powerhouse on Unix or Windows, using an database such as DB2, Oracle or SQL Server, is the easiest migration of any kind we have ever done.”

This summer Cognos noted that PowerHouse generated more than $29 million in revenue during its last fiscal year. The company’s total revenue was $683 million. This year’s version 8.4 included a release for the HP 3000 platform, and the company promises another maintenance release late this year.

But PowerHouse support for the MPE/iX version ends in December, 2006. And while PowerHouse now supports Eloquence databases in Unix and Windows, the 4GL doesn’t have a Linux release. Cognos remains undecided about supporting Itanium, too; it cites lack of customer interest in both Linux and Itanium.

“We will continue to provide support,” said director of customer operations Bob Berry. “And that means that the HP e3000 PowerHouse customer can be assured that there is a viable migration platform for their PowerHouse applications when they choose to migrate [from the 3000.]”

Cognos uses the same argument that HP once offered while defending the HP 3000. “The key is to use the best technology for the job, not necessarily the newest,” the company said in a message to PowerHouse users. “Technologies come and go. You want something that’s solid and that’s proven itself.”

Cognos’ Deskin wants customers to concentrate on the 10 percent that no PowerHouse migration tool offers yet. “Everyone knows that the last 10 percent can kill you,” he said.

Such risks are part of any migration plan. Great Falls’ Miller said, “We may decide to keep PowerHouse and use Axiant, but we may not. My job as an analyst is to investigate all options and choose the one that works the best for our users and our department.”