Thousands of HP 3000 sites relied on Cognos' Powerhouse at the language's peak, in the days when a home-grown application was the norm among the 3000 community's shops. That number has declined, along with the 3000's installed base, but some companies are still using Powerhouse while they try to migrate away form the fourth-generation language.

One such company is gm2 Logistics, Ltd. The company began using the packaged MPE application from Distribution Resources back in the 1980s, and the years have added a significant amount of customization through Powerhouse. John Boyd, the IT director there, is looking for a report from an HP 3000 site that has migrated away from Powerhouse.

gm2 is moving to the IBM iSeries servers, which Boyd has said are a revelation. However, it's the application migration which has run over budget, he reports.

We are an existing user on an Series 989-250 in the UK. Our entire system is written in Powerhouse and uses Omnidex and all the usual utilities: JMS, Orbit, Netbase and DBGeneral. We have about 450 users and are in the midst of this migration to an iSeries.

As something of a personal crusade on my part, do you know of any similar companies over your side of the pond that have successfully re-engineered their Powerhouse applications to something else, and been successful? The costs of the new project to migrate to an ERP system seem to be mushrooming, and I would just like to see if there are any other similar migrations from a similar outfit.