PowerHouse DEAD
Terry Curran
terrycurran@onetel.net.uk
Sat, 15 Mar 2003 09:36:39 -0000
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PowerHouse may not actually be dead, but its dying on its feet (if it
ever had any that is).
I am one of those unfortunate people with 15++ years of PowerHouse,
working as a contractor here in the UK. Over recent weeks I have been
to a few company sites for interviews (for my next contract), In two
cases, the company concerned is in the process of replacing PowerHouse
applications with other products and are only looking for someone to
support there existing PowerHouse application for 12 - 18 months whilst
they migrate to their new product, one is going to SAP, the other to
Vista. The migration to Vista is in fact a retrograde step, as the
company concerned migrated from Vista to PowerHouse about 8 years ago,
they are only going back to Vista due to being taken over by another
company.
At least two previous contract have been to support the PowerHouse
applications during migration to other products, in these two cases to
Oracle products.
The general trend seems to be to migrate away from PowerHouse. A lot of
companies seem to be going down the Oracle route, perhaps this is
Cognos's own fault, as they have been pushing Oracle to replace
Interbase as the underlying database (support for Interbase has been
removed in version 8 products). Many companies seem to be thinking,
'hang on a minute, if we migrate our database to Oracle, we then need
Oracle experience, as well as PowerHouse experience, we are paying for
two products, and for additional staff to support those two products,
why not cut our losses and move totally to Oracle and thus reduce our
costs'. Perhaps if Cognos acquired Interbase back from Borland, and
bundled it with PowerHouse (as they did once before) then they would
have a database that was supported by all platforms that also support
PowerHouse. Their customers would have reduced costs (it's a bundled
product), and simplified support as Interbase is a great deal easier to
use than Oracle - when you use Interbase you don't have to worry about
things like database segments, rollback segments, etc. A number of times
when trying to load Oracle database tables with QTP I have had problems
with Rollbacks, a problem I never, never, never encountered with
Interbase.
Another possible reason for the decline in popularity of PowerHouse, is
that the screen interface looks very dated. Most companies these days
have an investment in PCs whereas most PowerHouse applications are still
very much 'green screen' based. An attempt has been made to update the
interface with PowerHouse Web, and PowerHouse Client for Windows (if it
still exists) but neither of these products give you the same
functionality as the original PowerHouse products with their more
'dated' interface. I think this was also a case of 'too little, too
late'!
Cognos can make more money from their BI tools than from PowerHouse, so
they will obviously push them rather than PowerHouse.
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-----Original Message-----
From: powerh-l-admin@cube.swau.edu [mailto:powerh-l-admin@cube.swau.edu]
On Behalf Of Edis, Robert
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2003 6:01 PM
To: 'powerh-l@lists.swau.edu'
Subject: RE: PowerHouse DEAD
Well at least in its 'twilight' time. It seems that even other 4GL
products such as Progress, Forte (which once looked very promising),
etc., unless they are explicitly tied to a database or application
package such as SAP/Abap, PeopleSoft/PeopleTools, Oracle/Forms, etc.,
are waning.
The world is fast moving to be dominated by only two major development
technologies - .NET (well actually VB) and J2EE. NEITHER of which is as
good as PH in terms of rapid development, data access and robustness.
Nevertheless as long as CIO's, magazines and fortune tellers like
Gartner know of nothing else then that's the way it will be.
Can't someone from Cognos tell us why there is no interest in ADT at the
Technical Forum or the User Days?
Why haven't we seen any of the ADT tools advertised in trade magazines?
Why is ADT revenue not mentioned in the Cognos financial reports to
investors? (I'm one) Why doesn't Cognos create an active and productive
relationship with the developer community as Microsoft and Sun have
done? How come there are no leading edge business packages available
built with Cognos ADT tools? (Cognos IS developing such packages with
the BI tools).
I must ask these questions as a developer of, user of and investor in
Cognos tools. I do not want to disparage the efforts of good people
like Bob Deskin, Conrad Whithall, Christina Hasse, Etc. They are
sincere and really want to make the ADT tools not only work well but be
generally accepted as economic, efficient and worthwhile development
products. These questions must really go to the senior decision makers
at Cognos.
In the meantime I'm betting my future on data warehousing and SQL
Server.
Blue
-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Heatherington [mailto:kent.heatherington@sympatico.ca]
Sent: Friday, March 14, 2003 11:24 AM
To: powerh-l@lists.swau.edu
Subject: PowerHouse DEAD
Agreed Bob. I'm out in B.C. at one of the few remaining shops. We just
advertised for a 1 month contract PH resource. I could'nt believe the
quantity and quality of applicants, most out of work for at least a
year, and again most with 10-20 years experience.
Again, most having retrained in Web technologies, but not finding work
either. It was pretty scary.
And the attitude with this client is why should I ever look at another
Cognos product when they dropped us on the PowerHouse product line (for
example 8.10 with no Open/VMS features !).
AGreed its dead.
Kent Heatherington
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