Re: User based pricing Re: Saving the System i: Fight Pervasive with Pervasive

On 12/13/06, rob@xxxxxxxxx <rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Why would user based pricing be any good?

Development machine?
Most of the grunt editing is done via WDSC or some other editor nowadays.
That load is off.

if your having trouble measuring users, this counts as one user.
every client access PC that connects to the system is a single user.

Production machine?
EDI vendor already has zero flexibility with tiered pricing - "sure it's
on a 570 now, but limited use, most processing is on other stuff".  Reply
"get the flipping check in the mail, slave".
Some other vendors are using user pricing, like BPCS.
Then you get into the argument over what is a user?  If I use multiple
5250 sessions does each count as a user?  If I have 1,000 users but they
all share the same 5250 user id but use a different application provided
password for the application does that count as one user?  If I have a
batch job that feeds data from one major customer off to several divisions
does that count as one user?

I dont know. How does MSFT measure windows server users? However they
do it they are making a lot more money with it than the i5 division.
DB2 on the p5 is priced per core or per user.  What I like about UBP
is it incentivizes IBM to add features to the OS and sell its hardware
at low prices.  faster hardware + more features => more users => more
money => no more complaining => everyone is happy.

-Steve