From the Believe or Not Department at MAPICS...

Here's a laugh I though I would share with the group:

We have been a MAPICS user for 24+ years, currently on release 6.  Our iSeries 
box is an 820-2395-1523 (120 interactive CPW - 370 total CPW).  We are on tier 
pricing with MAPICS and have about 70 concurrent users.  We do some other 
things on the box outside of MAPICS.

IBM is currently offering some very good upgrade prices on an 820 to 810 
upgrade.  This upgrade would do several things for us including -  Triple the 
performance to 1070 CPW with no interactive limit as well as lower the IBM 
software tier from P20 to P10 thus saving us about $7,000 per year in software 
support and maintenance.  For an initial investment of $50K-$60K the ROI looks 
very good not even considering the performance boost.

Here is where it gets funny.  I spoke to the troll under the bridge, I mean 
MAPICS, and asked if there would be any charge from them, hoping that the may 
have indexed their performance tiers at least once since 1978.  Here are the 
options they gave me:

Convert Tier to Tier all current modules to the new machine $1.7M (yes that is 
an M and would be about $24,000 per user) or convert to concurrent user lisence 
for $130K.  They also proposed a much lower cost option to convert to 
concurrent users with the MAPICS Essentials package and I am sure there is some 
value in getting those modules we don't already have but never the less it has 
probably sunk the deal.  What was a relative no brainer $50K decision turns 
into a $120K plus major capital decision on our part.

Joe Perrault