Re: IBM is so confusing!

Pete:

Isn't an IBM Business Partner's job to understand its customers environment and assist them in keeping current? Part of that is having its customer list along with the products they have regardless of if the partner sold it to them or not and then helping upgrade or maintain the products, in this case software maintenance, when it is ready to be sold. That requires knowing your customer's environment and knowing the expiration dates on the maintenance. Then getting in front of the customer to sell that maintenance upgrade before the competition does.

Why then should it be IBMs job to remind you to keep up your own SWMA?

SWMA and other maintenance is one of the highest margin deals a partner can do. Failure to keep up with it separates the average partner from the great one that makes a profit in today's world.

It is not IBMs job to make a partner have good business practices, rather to enable it to have good practices. IBM does a great job of the later....

Jim Oberholtzer
CEO/Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects, LLC


On 2/10/2011 11:42 AM, Pete Helgren wrote:

Do you see any irony in that? The people who serve and build the
customer base have the most difficult time with IBM administrivia?

And really, how hard can it be? My difficulty is in dealing with the
changing product ID and part numbers as the OS level changes and the
product names evolve. They have a machine that can play Jeopardy but
can't manage a simple date that triggers an email message?

I may be nit picking but MyEclipse is smart enough to send me a notice
and even warns me from within the IDE that support will be expiring
soon. I guess I hold IBM to a pretty high customer service standard and
for a small company like mine, paying $532 vs $177 per seat for RDp SWMA
is significant.

Pete Helgren
Value Added Software, Inc
www.asaap.com
www.opensource4i.com


On 2/10/2011 10:20 AM, Vern Hamberg wrote:

> Pete
>
> I do not know that IBM ever notifies its partners on the lease program
> about SWMA expiring - I've not seen at the last couple places I've
> worked. I just credit it to, IBM expects its hardware partners to handle
> this. Unfortunately, OUR BP is IBM Techline, and they don't do it.
>
> However, the re-up charge for maintenance is less than civilians pay, as
> I recall.
>
> Vern
>
> On 2/10/2011 10:58 AM, Pete Helgren wrote:

>> Not to add fuel to the fire here but I have encountered an interesting
>> twist in just the past 2-3 years. It isn't only initial licensing that
>> appears to be a area where IBM has turned to recover some development
>> cost, it is SWMA as well. I have a developer lease so I get some pretty
>> substantial discounts but the past three years I haven't gotten any
>> notice of the SWMA lapsing and further, with the OS and*some*
>> individual licensing of products it has gotten more and more difficult
>> to figure out which products have individual SWMA and which are covered
>> by SWMA on the OS. Thus, IBM can charge higher prices for reinstating
>> SWMA (three times higher with RDp for instance). As a business partner,
>> I sometimes don't receive an IBM notice when my customer's SWMA is
>> expiring. They have to pay for reinstatement as well. Thankfully, the
>> distributor I work with has a better system than IBM to notify me of
>> customer SWMA that is expiring. But, heaven help you if you deal with
>> IBM directly and assume that they will notify you when your SWMA expires
>> because they won't.
>>
>> Of course I could concoct some conspiracy theory but I think that IBM
>> has no economic incentive to notify of expiring SWMA because they can
>> charge for reinstatement. Every software license program I participate
>> in has some kind of notification system to alert me to expiring
>> support. All except IBM. Seems like the only company that isn't
>> "smarter" on this planet, is IBM. Don't get me wrong I LOVE this
>> platform and IBM support is top notch, but the systems that notify of
>> expiration and allow us to pay for SWMA are archaic at best and don't
>> reflect well on IBM.
>>
>> I don't know what your experience has been, but I have never received a
>> notice from IBM that my SWMA was expiring. I usually discover that it
>> expired when I need to update something, as I just did (which triggered
>> the rant)
>>
>> Pete Helgren
>> Value Added Software, Inc
>> www.asaap.com
>> www.opensource4i.com