By some estimates the 4GL software from Cognos sat on 7,000 HP 3000s at the 4GL's high water mark. A very serious share of that installed base was using only the reporting tool associated with Powerhouse, Quiz. Manufacturing sites such as those employing MANMAN, plus other applications, relied on Quiz to produce reports for managers and C-level executives. In many instances, these Quiz licenses came without restrictions or separate support agreements.

These are the sites that never had much of a business relationship with Cognos, and none at all by the time IBM bought the 4GL suite in 2007. Some of these sites eventually felt they needed to buy support, though, and some believed maintaining a license was important -- even though they'd become Quiz users when they implemented their application. The majority of Quiz sites stopped paying for support long ago. Like many bits of MPE/iX software, Quiz was frozen in time, a day when a reporting tool could cost thousands to support.

It was a bolt-on module, something that customers could be taught to un-bolt when pricing got outrageous, though. Cognos used to try to tamp down the outrage during the 1990s about license costs. Renegotiations were common, because the default pricing maintained strategies of an era when Windows was not a lower-cost enterprise option.

Steve Suraci of Pivital Solutions supports HP 3000 sites as an exclusive business model. It's an all-3000 vendor. He checked in about the latest shock over Powerhouse re-license prices. In the era of of ownership by Unicom, the licenses have soared agin. But there's another option to letting Powerhouse lock up a company to a 3000 license.

Back in the day, Cognos was always out of their minds regarding pricing. When they were bought by IBM, they got much more realistic and started offering a seat-based licensing model. Then Unicom entered the picture and they lost their minds!  

We have a customer that owned the reporting-only version of the product, but was no longer on support. The only option available from Unicom was to re-purchase the full-blown development product in order to upgrade. The most current product doesn’t even run on the HP 3000. Needless to say, we replaced Quiz with something more robust and much less costly.