Ottawa, Canada-based applications generator supplier Cognos Inc is about to consummate the moves into Unix and distributed computing it’s been flagging for a year, with the planned Six By Six launch of six products on six Unix systems in August. A new version of the company’s flagship product, PowerHouse, is main dog in a pack of tools to ship on SunOS, HP-UX, IBM AIX RS/6000, DEC Ultrix, Data General’s DG-UX, and Santa Cruz Operation Xenix. This last is perhaps the most noteworthy from Cognos’ viewpoint, since early indications were that this is a implementation brought forward from 1993. The products are version 7.0 of PowerHouse, the end-user SQL query tool Impromptu, the PowerPlay executive decision tool, the non-graphic end-user and reporting tool InQuisitive and the application and maintenance tool Architect. Cognos’ core development work is all done on Sun workstations at its Ottawa research and development centre, and as early as last June a version of PowerHouse 7.0 for SunOs was finished and ready to ship, simply awaiting the executive green light. According to Cognos’ ebullient senior vice-president of research and development Ron Zambonini, converting from one Unix system to another is a commercial decision only, since it’s not a technologically difficult move: I want to be under every Unix in the world. As part of the same announcement, Cognos, which derives the vast majority of its business from the proprietary mini world – 20,000 of its 35,000 PowerHouse licences worldwide are on its traditional systems like Hewlett-Packard MPE or Data General MV – is positioning Cognos as a client-server tool, with the Unix systems as servers and Microsoft Windows 3.x as clients. Cognos will also offer Motif client support sometime soon – but as a co-founder of anti-software industry hype body The Software Business Practices Council, Cognos is cautious about announcing anything not shippable within 90 days. The shift is as much based on a desire to snare Unix software sales as caution about competition from fellow proprietary language tool suppliers Uniface BV and Progress Software Corp. The company is still chuckling about recruiting Steve Debler, former Progress vice-president of marketing and number seven recruit in Progress, as new head of product, corporate and channels marketing. Dutch outfit Uniface has a good message – it’s the same as ours, says Zambonini, part prompting the smartening up of Cognos’ graphical user interface capabilities and user-friendliness in version 7. Cognos has just about sorted out one of the big problems software companies with a prop-rietary system background face when getting into Unix: pricing. We’ve modelled 500 of our customers, and within 12 months all pricing will be per-user, as the Unix products already are, adds Zambonini. Much of this was outlined at Cognos’s first international user group meeting, Cognition ’91, in Los Angeles last June, which explains the low-key reaction of journalists and analysts to the roadshow. That shouldn’t take away the value of the announcement: Cognos, well regarded as technically sound and with much work on exploiting object-orientation quietly under its belt, is offering users a firm bridge into distributed and client-server computing while preserving their existing applications.
