Re: ITJungle report on i5 pricing and marketing was: More COMMON

On 9/13/06, Holden Tommy <Tommy.Holden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So in essence you & ITJungle are saying that having CPU On Demand makes
the machine "geared down"??  That's just not the case.  It's a feature
that is available to you, not a part of the machine capability you paid
for.  IMO it just makes it easier for me to tap into additional CPU
without having to perform a full upgrade, it's an available feature..not
a part of the "base" system.

>From the same article:
The numbers in the table pretty much speak for themselves, and they
speak quite loudly, too. A base i5 520 Standard Edition machine costs
under $1 per transaction per minute (TPM), which is about what a fully
loaded i5 520 Value Edition or Express Edition machine (which has a
modest amount of 5250 processing capacity) costs. In this regard, i5 520
Standard Edition machines are offering pretty good value. Moreover,
compared to the iSeries line in 2003, where a similarly powerful box
might cost anywhere from around $2 to $4 per TPM running OS/400 Standard
Edition and the iSeries i5 line from 2004, where the first-generation of
i5 520 machines could cost around $2 per TPM, this is, again, a big
improvement. Even Enterprise Edition machines have come down in cost a
great deal. Back in 2003, an iSeries Enterprise Edition box in the same
power class could cost $10 per TPM, and by 2004, with the iSeries i5
line, that had dropped to $5 to $6 per TPM. So the roughly $3 per TPM
that IBM is charging for base boxes today seems like a big improvement.

Seems that pricing is going down...so what's your beef?  Is amount per
transaction figured into your "pricing issues"?  I think not....

Yes, the price per TPM has come down. Users are also requiring a lot
more transactions. In order for the growing complexity of software
applications to stay understandable and manageable for the DP people
you have to raise the abstraction level. To do that you need CPU.
Look at WDSc. A lot of people say it is a great tool. But to use it
you need a modern PC because it has a lot of code, a lot of modules
that are coupled in ways that are not efficient CPU cycle wise, but
which get the most functionality out of the system.

-Steve