Re: V2R3 to V3R2 upgrade sticker shock

[Dave Mahadevan <mahadevan@xxxxxxxx>]

James W. Kilgore wrote:
> 
> Dave Mahadevan wrote:
> >
> > Carl Galgano wrote:
> > >
> > > I just got off the phone with my friendly hardware/software vendor.  I was
> > > inquiring on a price to upgrade my E04 from V2R3 to V3R2.  After I got up
> > > off the floor I verified that I did hear hime correctly that the price 
>would
> > > be over $9000 for 5 users!!!!
> > >
> > There you go again questioning IBM's motives in pricing.
> >
> > Go figure! :-))
> >
> > Dave Mahadevan..
> >
> Take what they say with a grain of salt....IBM doesn't like this, but if
> you say you have 5 users and have the RPG compiler, they will charge you
> for 5 programmers doing CONCURRENT compiles.
> 
> You can order 5 users, 1 user of RPG, 2 CONCURRENT users of Query, etc.
> 
> Remember you can have 50 terminals, but what you are charged for are the
> number of users active at any given point in time for any given product.

There are certain software which do not have a user charge. Most of the
programming languages do not have a user based charge (not SQL).  The
bean counters at IBM are very clever.   They have the old processor
based group charge (remember the F5, G6 etc.?).  Then starting version
3, they layered that with a user based pricing for stuff like, client
access, os/400, query, office vision etc.  Fortunately they set a max
cap on the number of users they will charge (for example on the P20
group I think if you pay for 50 users, you are set at *NOMAX). This
means you dont pay for the 51st user and so on...

What I would seriously recommend to IBM is get rid of the four groups
into one and make everything user based. This will boost hardware sales
because customers can migrate across processor group boundries.  But
knowing IBM's bean counters, expect V4 to have a zip code based pricing
layer added on top of the user based pricing layer :-)).  Also,
introduce V3R3 (there he goes again!), so people will get tired of poor
response time using the exotic features and get their management to pay
for faster processors.
 
-- 
Thank You.

Regards

Dave Mahadevan.. mailto:mahadevan@fuse.net

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