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| CORE Home > Our Company > E-Bulletin |
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Volume 4 Welcome to the fourth issue of our e-bulletin. Please feel free to forward it to your colleagues. |
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CORE Introduces New Business Unit: CORE Information Technology Consultants Ltd., ("CORE IT") CORE Software Corporation recently unveiled its newest offering: CORE IT. CORE IT will provide professional services to government and private sector organizations. "To date, CORE has focused on one specific aspect of the migration business, that being the migration of PowerHouse applications," says Rolf Christensen, co-founder and President of CORE Software Corporation. "The introduction of CORE IT will allow us to leverage our knowledge and expertise in application development and maintenance in non migration related engagements, while enabling our PowerHouse migration group (CORE Migration) to maintain its focus." CORE IT, operating as a separate business unit of CORE Software Corporation, provides IT Professional Services and E-Business Solutions. Leveraging our full-time in-house group of CORE talent, our E-Business practitioners are focused on the development of Web-based business critical applications. Our 4GL centric .NET development framework and components, developed with active technical participation from Microsoft Canada, and our Java development framework, yield tremendous productivity, supporting further enhancements of Web-enabled software development platforms. Please visit our Web site for information regarding our Oracle practices and our .NET and Java based CORE Components and CORE Framework. Alexis Williamson will manage the evolution of CORE IT. As the Director of Sales and Marketing, Alexis is responsible for strategic positioning, sales, marketing, client support, recruitment, research and business development. Alexis has been working in the Information Technology Consulting Services field for over 13 years and brings a vast amount of experience and expertise, having held similar positions with firms in Canada and the United Kingdom, including The Application System Group (ASG), CNC Global, Technical Employment Services (TES) and Hunt Personnel. For a sample list of project references and for further detail on CORE IT's services, please visit our Corporate Web site, www.coreitconsultants.com; contact: Alexis Williamson, Director, Sales and Marketing, (613) 727-3134 x254. PowerHouse futures face diverging destinations Development language mounts new version as migration suite emerges Reprinted with permission of The 3000 NewsWire, 11702 Buckingham Road, Austin, TX 78759. Volume 9, Issue 2. As Cognos prepares to talk up a new version of its PowerHouse application development tool, the HP 3000 installed base is starting to hear about an alternative which promises to automate the migration away from the veteran fourth generation language. By some estimates several thousand sites are using the Cognos products PowerHouse and Quiz, more on the HP 3000 than all other platforms. But much has changed about computing since the heyday of such automated development tools. The ascent of Microsoft's Visual Basic platform and .NET has mirrored the drop in growth for PowerHouse installations. To respond, Cognos has followed the market's shift toward Windows, shifting its focus toward its Business Intelligence (BI) product line, a string of Windows-based reporting and analysis tools that operate with the leading relational databases. Riding the strength of its BI products, Cognos reported rising revenues and profits for its quarter ending Aug. 31. The company posted sales of $158 million, up from $129 million one year ago, and earnings increased from $13.7 million to $18.2 million. BI products like ReportNet — a new Web-based reporting application that develops and delivers business reports and competes with tools like Crystal Reports — make up the majority of Cognos' revenues. But the majority of the HP 3000 customers who use Cognos products rely on PowerHouse, the business generated by the company's ADT division. Some firms have an investment in PowerHouse that goes back more than a decade. Some share of those companies are looking at a future without the product. That vision of development without a familiar 4GL concerns the organizations who may move away from PowerHouse when their HP 3000s are put out of service. "This product is without question one of the most reliable development tools I have worked with in my 18 years of software development," said Jennifer Grimes, an information analyst with the City of Spokane, Wash. "Unfortunately, our MIS department has determined that it is in the city's best interest to gradually move all systems currently residing on the HP 3000 to another platform within the next several years. And it seems as though migration may not be an option." While Grimes added that "the Cognos company is outstanding in every aspect," some customers continue to struggle with the Cognos pricing model, even after the company revised it in 2001. "As 3000 customers migrate they are as likely to migrate away from PowerHouse as they are from the 3000," said John Pickering, a PowerHouse consultant working at a North American wood product manufacturer. Bob Berry, the director of customer operations at Cognos, said pricing on upgrade fees hasn't generated a lot of customer complaint. "We haven't had a tremendous amount of push-back. You always get customers who push back, but it hasn't been bad." But those issues over PowerHouse's upgrade fees are being brought into focus this year while companies upgrade their HP 3000s for the last time. Cognos, like many HP 3000 software suppliers, collects new revenue when a customer increases their HP 3000 performance through an upgrade. PowerHouse sites, especially those using Quiz as a report writer, have chafed under those upgrade fees. "We have two HP 3000 systems, 989 and 969," said one manager who wanted her name withheld. "I looked into replacing one of them with an N-Class and Cognos wanted $100,000 for Quiz and would not talk about an upgrade rather than a new purchase. That $100,000 was number one among the deal-killer issues. I look forward to being on a platform where we can use some other report writer." Berry believes the applications built with PowerHouse will survive the changes in the 3000's market. These "legacy" apps, as Berry calls them, will outlast the 3000's transition. "They may be choosing to maintain their environment as it exists today, and migrate in three to five years," he said. "Or they will keep those legacy apps on the 3000 box in the corner of the room and it will run forever, and they'll take on some kind of high-falutin' application company-wide. These legacy apps will always be there." Like many 3000 software providers, Cognos also draws a good share of its MPE revenues off support contracts. Berry said these support renewal dollars "have declined very gradually, and they have declined because of the change of the cost of the license. There was a rapid decline after Y2K, and it's going down at a slower pace." Migration options Cognos offers its own migration option for its 3000 customers, one that moves MPE/iX PowerHouse applications to the HP-UX environment. At Idaho State University, IT manager Blair Combs said the product's track record has earned PowerHouse another lap on HP's new course. "We are committed to PowerHouse and PowerHouse Web for the foreseeable future," Combs said. "We have plans in place to move our systems to HP-UX running Eloquence by the end of 2006. We are beta-testing the latest version of PowerHouse for HP-UX that supports Eloquence." Combs said the 4GL has kept the IT headcount down for the university. "PowerHouse has provided us the ability to continue developing in-house systems while supporting over 80 existing application systems with only nine full-time staff," he said. "The stability of the HP 3000 and PowerHouse are second to none. We expect this to continue when we move to HP-UX." But some Cognos customers have shown concern over the company's shift toward BI products, and are researching steps to move away from PowerHouse. CORE Migration, a company operating in Cognos' headquarters city of Ottawa, has put together a migration suite of tools and services to move customers. One CORE white paper tells the story of an ERP software provider, Visaer, that first shifted away from its MPE PowerHouse roots, then off the 4GL altogether. The company decided that the focus at Cognos had moved away from PowerHouse. There are two ways of accessing the CORE Migration method, paths which may sound familiar to companies which are studying migration options: CORE-Directed, where the company manages the migration start to finish, and Self-Directed, where CORE plans the migration and trains customers to use its tools. CORE's VP of Sales and Marketing Wayne Lucky said the CORE-Directed option is fastest, and the majority of its engagements are in this method. "It depends on the skill set of the customer," he said, "and whether they want to get involved." Visaer came out of the HP 3000 environment with its MRP applications, according to Chief Technology Officer Geoff Andrews of Visaer. The company first created its Visibility MRP application using PowerHouse on MPE, then spun off the product into the aerospace maintenance sector to create Visaer, which Andrews described as software to manage "the medical records of an aircraft." Visaer moved away from the HP 3000 and Digital VMS to Oracle and Unix in the middle 1990s, and later used CORE to make their transition away from PowerHouse in 2001 and 2002. Andrews said the engagement proceeded as well as he expected, adding that the database work was behind them when CORE began working at Visaer. "We were already in the relational database environment, so we didn't have a lot of the issues that CORE's other customers have, of figuring their way from non-relational database to relational," Andrews said. "We'd already paid that price with our own staff." Andrews said he felt he could have been better prepared for the work with CORE by being more rigorous about analyzing applications. "I would have been a little more brutal about retiring old and tired functionality," he said. "We ended up paying for some stuff that probably didn't need to be converted." Regardless of which way the customer proceeds, CORE's migration is being touted as faster than replacing a PowerHouse application with something off the shelf, or building it from scratch. "Then there's the added benefit of knowing what you will get before you buy," Lucky said. Migration isn't often associated with rapid results, but CORE stands behind its automation in making the claim. "Because of our design preservation process, we automatically capture those critical business rules," Lucky said, "so we eliminate the tedious and time consuming requirement for analysis, functional specs, detailed design the application architecture, those kinds of things. We do all that automatically, and that's where we save time and money." The company uses a workbench that's made up of a Design Preservation Toolkit, a repository of an object-oriented database and API library, and a Forward-Engineering Toolkit. PowerHouse applications are re-engineered by these tools to the Microsoft .NET or Java environments. IMAGE and KSAM databases are moved to Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and DB2 databases. CORE says its Migration Repository converts business rules and program instructions to a language neutral format, meaning it removes the PowerHouse syntax specifics. "Because of our technology, PowerHouse similarities are evident in the new technology," Lucky said. While automation is key to the value in the CORE engagement, Lucky said migrations are never fully automated. Whether through CORE's engineers or the customer's developers, some human effort is required to finish each job. "Even though our goal is to get the automation to 100 percent, we recognize we'll probably never get there, because of the intricacies in the way PowerHouse and the dictionary deal with the operating system, the database and 3GL programs," Lucky said. "We tell the customer from 70 to 90 percent of the work can be automated, and the rest is manual." The Forward Engineering Tool supports the transformation of PowerHouse specifics. Quiz reports become stored procedures and Active Reports or Crystal Reports; QTP programs become PL/SQL, Transact SQL or Java; and QDesign programs are transformed into ASP.NET — or Java with JSP for the presentation layer and Enterprise Java Beans for the business logic. CORE's message to PowerHouse customers is that they are relying on technology that has served them well. "However, newer, modern technologies such as Java and .NET provide additional capabilities and functionality that better meets the demands of businesses today," Lucky said. User interface issues don't motivate PowerHouse migrations as much as these kinds of essential technology choices, he added. Mission-critical applications like those built in PowerHouse represent an investment that most sites find difficult to quantify. The programs grew up before packaged software became available. "They have written some custom logic in their application that gives them competitive advantage," he said. "They severely underestimate the time and dollars to move this properly. They think they'll hire a couple of .NET programmers to recreate the screens." 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."  Question:What do I do with all these Quiz Reports? Answer: In the migration of any enterprise-critical PowerHouse system, a frequently asked question is, "How do we migrate our Quiz reports?" Quiz often comprises the greatest number of application programs and, with the ease of use of a fourth-generation language, the user community may have its own reports to be migrated as well. Reports vary in complexity, from single-table tabular formats to complex, multi-pass reports involving several database tables. As well, there may be several reports that are no longer being used, while others have been copied multiple times with minor variations applied to each copy. The first step in the process is to obtain a sample output of each of the system reports, including those that may have been written by system users. Using these samples, you can query the user community to determine which reports, if any, may no longer be in use and can be eliminated from the inventory. In reviewing the remaining reports, try to group them by content, looking for similar format but perhaps differences in sort criteria or data selection. This will help to identify reports that are similar in function and data access, and avoid the prospect of re-inventing the wheel each time a report is migrated. Keep in mind that multi-pass reports may share like functions even though the final content is not similar. As a result, it is necessary to analyze each pass in a multi-pass report to determine if there is any duplication of functionality. An advantage of the CORE Migration method is that, as part of the Design Preservation phase, much of the work is done automatically. Although we cannot tell you which of your reports are no longer being used, our process will separate multi pass reports into their component functions. As well, our metric point analysis of these reports will highlight report functions that may be duplicated. And, of course, our forward engineering process will generate completed reports in a fraction of the time it would take to reproduce them using today's Web development tools. Plus, our design method assures you of maximum performance, by separating the data access function and the report format function. Data access and selection are handled natively, in a SQL stored procedure. Depending on your target platform, the report formatting is completed by Active Reports or Crystal Reports. |
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