Cognos Inc last week rolled out PowerHouse Series 7, the latest version of its flagship product and the jumping off point to its second-generation client-server technology embodied in Axiant, the new graphical application development tool it currently has in beta test, which is due for general release around the US Labor Day holiday in early September. The Ottawa, Ontario company says that PowerHouse Series 7, Axiant’s foundation base, provides a scalable application architecture for building industrial-strength enterprise-wide client-server applications immediately. The applications leverage distributed resources including application servers, desktop personal computer clients and most importantly distributed databases such as Sybase Inc SQL Server and Borland International Inc’s InterBase as well as proprietary databases. PowerHouse 7 supports ANSI SQL92 level syntax, and its extendable transaction control gives developers control over database transactions including the timing of locks and transactions and multiple read-writes. It is out now on a number of Unix systems plus OpenVMS, MPE, Data General Corp AOS/VS and OS/400. The Ultrix release will be dropped for Digital Equipment Corp’s OSF/1 system in the future. Support for Oracle7 will be added in June. Prices for a development licence start at $3,000 and vary depending on the number of users or machine model. Cognos describes PowerHouse Series 7 together with PowerHouse Windows 1.2 with its full implementation of Windows 3.1 as the foundation of its second-generation client-server system. Axiant will use the PowerHouse language engine, so PowerHouse application code can be imported into Axiant for redevelopment as fully graphical distributed client-server applications. Cognos will have an Axiant Software Developers Kit in May.
