Cognos Inc of Ottawa, Canada has woken up to the fact that no matter how good products are, they do not sell themselves. Consequently, it accompanied its latest products launch with the promise that some strong marketing deals are round the corner. As promised (CI No 1,417), the company rolled out PowerHouse for the AS/400, a gateway to Oracle called StarGate, initially available on DEC VAXes, the PowerHouse application development environment for Unix, now available for HP-UX, and soon to be released for DEC’s Ultrix and Data General’s AViiON lines. Version 6.0 of PowerHouse was also launched, initially for VAX/VMS, which offers the additional capability of delivering windows-based applications. Cognos said it was applying the PowerHouse name to its entire applications development environment – it is aiming for PowerHouse ADE to become a generic term. It says that a marketing agreement will be announced with IBM towards year-end. Meanwhile DEC has signed with Cognos to distribute PowerHouse, and Cognos market development director Mike Hudgell is working on a closer relationship with both Hewlett-Packard and Data General. Although Hudgell, a recent recruit from DEC, stressed that open systems embrace proprietary hardware and software as well as Unix, the Unix environment presents the best new marketing opportunities for Cognos at the moment. This is because the database has not yet become a commodity on Unix hardware as it, arguably, has on, say, the VAX and the AS/400. For this reason Hudgell is looking to bundle Interbase’s StarBase database manager as part of PowerHouse with all Unix sales. With a question mark hanging over Ingres’ future, such a Cognos package might even appeal to the appropriate marketing managers at DEC and Hewlett-Packard.
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