Cognos Inc, the Canadian software tools company based in Ottawa has a computer-aided software engineering product called PowerCase up its sleeve, to be launched this month, which, if it can crack Oracle’s hold on the mindshare of mid-range users, looks a strong contender in this market and may return Cognos to its former growth pattern. However, Cognos, like so many technically strong companies in the computer industry, has among other worries, a profile problem. It is currently about the same size as Ingres and Informix and yet is far less well-known. It entered the software products market in 1979 with a report writer for the Hewlett-Packard 3000 minicomputer which metamorphosed into the Cognos PowerHouse fourth generation language. The company has since grown from a $3m (Canadian) concern then to the equivalent of a $96m company in 1990. In fact the group as a whole appears to be going through a sticky patch at present, reporting nine month net losses of $15.6m in January (CI No 1,334). The problems seem to stem from the application of North American sales models throughout the world and from the late delivery of products. Some parts of the group are prospering, however, and one of these is the UK operation which has grown at 48% during the current year. Indeed recognition of Cognos Ltd’s success has come with the appointment of its managing director Mike Hensman as group vice-president at the end of this financial year. Similarly, the Bracknell-based operation is heading the research and development of the group’s computer-aided software engineering product and the push into the Unix market. The group has also responded to its declining fortunes by implementing field marketing control in its different regions. Before these problems, which only became visible over the past year, Cognos was doing very nicely. Indeed, UK technology director Mike Baggott believes that two factors were crucial in establishing Cognos’s success, differentiating it from also-ran fourth generation language companies: firstly it has always operated on the principle that users do not want to be locked into a database any more than they want to be locked into an operating system, so in the mid-range PowerHouse will integrate with a variety of databases and, secondly, it has always operated by striking alliances with hardware vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, DEC and Data General, working with them to run PowerHouse on their proprietary hardware. Of course some cynics might argue that such a philosophy is politic if you haven’t got a database of your own to sell. Nevertheless, Cognos has done well so far by supporting bundled databases such as DEC’s RMS and Rdb and Hewlett-Packard’s Turbo Language. However, a year ago Cognos licensed Interbase’s database (CI No 1,084), which it sells as StarBase, in a move to branch into open systems. Indeed, Cognos products now also run under HP/UX and Data General’s DG/UX for AViiON, and the company is committed to supporting notable third party databases. To this end a version of PowerHouse is currently in field test to support Oracle.
InQuizitive
For a company hither-to so committed to the bastions of proprietary hardware vendors it is surprising that Cognos has no IBM product as yet. This is possibly because Cognos has a history of working with hardware vendors and IBM has only recently come to a relationship with Cognos. However, now the two companies have got together and PowerHouse will be available on AS/400s in the summer. It seems likely that Cognos products will soon also run under DEC’s Ultrix and IBM’s AIX operating systems although in both cases the timing depends on the whims of the hardware giants. Cognos has not rested on its success with PowerHouse and, aside from the develop-ment of the soon-to-be-unveiled PowerCase, it branched into end-user technology by launching two information analysis tools in January. One called InQuizitive runs on terminals and addresses warehouse information needs, the other called PowerPlay caters for middle management (whose companies will not shell out thousa
nds of pounds to provide them with an executive information system) and runs under Microsoft’s Windows. They both work off whatever the business’s core management information system is and PowerPlay could be hooked into something like All-in-1 or OfficeVision to offer a full-blown executive information system accessing external information. In the UK these two products between them have generated just under UKP1m in sales in the last financial quarter helping to fuel Cognos Ltd’s growth. If Cognos’s undoubted technical expertise continues unabounded then it has only its sales strategy to blame if it doesn’t bloom this decade. – Katy Ring
