Re: [SPAM] Re: Upgrade woes -- MIDRANGE-L

Yes, and my advice to the customer was in fact to negotiate with SSA/Infor! This was a few years ago, and would have saved them much pain. However, they chose not to go that route.
I also agree about pricing by cpu/tier etc - so many of my clients have stayed on systems that were too small and overloaded as a result! Although of course that's handy for me, as my speciality is tuning...

cheers,

Clare

Larry Bolhuis wrote:

I see your problem and understand. I'm not so sure though that IBM yanked those upgrades without prior notice, that is VERY rare for them. We almost always are told about things SO far in advance that we forget about the upcoming deadlines!

Is the customer current on maintenance and support contracts for the software? If they are not then see Rob's post earlier because they may be in a very bad legal situation. While I do NOT agree with much of the pricing as I mentioned earlier I also do NOT believe customers should be using software that is any way unlicensed. You can hate the pricing model but if you choose to use the software you'd better be in compliance. If they ARE current then you have some leverage with the vendor to negotiate an upgrade and while it shouldn't be this hard, most vendors DO listen when you say: "Either we work together on upgrading to another machine for a reasonable amount or we will move this workload to another machine and drop maintenance and licensing on this machine altogether." This translates to the vendor "Either I pay you some reasonable amount more or reduce my payments to you to Nothing." Most vendors which still have brains will take "Some reasonable amount more" over "Nothing."
Remember the $1.3M I mentioned in my prior post? The customer did the math and as a 10+ year customer of BPCS they calculated that ALL licensing, ALL training, ALL maintenance and ALL upgrade charges since they had became a customer were less than $1M. Negotiations ensued and while I cannot divulge the resulting number, all parties were satisfied in the end and the upgrade did happen. Stupid? Yep, the customer was bitter and thought the vendor was an idiot for even asking for such a number. And since then the only thing they have paid is annual license fees. They won't use the vendor again.

Lucas mentioned the 'CPU' and 'CORE" charge methods as outmoded. He is exactly right. While I have no problem with that as a licensing OPTION it cannot be the only option for most software. Either named or concurrent users (depends on the software which makes the most sense) or some number of transactions per month should be a workable and reasonable price structure for most software. If you need EDI software to do 50 transactions per month with one customer but you're on a P50 group machine you should NOT pay HUGELY more than the customer who does 50,000 transactions per month on his 'dedicated for EDI' machine in the P05 group, that's just NUTS.
- Larry
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Subject
Re: Upgrade woes

Hi Larry,

You're so right, and it is more than the hardware! In fact we had a
perfectly workable solution in place to keep this client going until IBM
suddenly decided not to give out keys for 'old' hardware OS in case of
upgrade from feature to feature. (If we had known this was going to happen
we would have upgraded all 12 countries in advance.)

Actually the SSA key only looks at the model, not the feature code. So we
would have been able to grow within the model with two or more upgrades,
from 4gb memory to 8gb to whatever it is on the 2064, from 1-way to 4-way,
and from 240 interactive CPW to 1050 CPW, which would have seen China
through several years more production using BPCS. There is a long-term
plan to move off i/BPCS anyway. Probably now their only route is to join
some of their fellows on the box in Thailand - the Thais just scraped in
under the wire with their upgrade order (these are all second user boxes
by the way) and are now happily working on an 820 with 8Gb and 1050
interactive and 300Gb dasd, and oodles of spare capacity.....! Trouble is,
the Chinese work so damn hard that the interactive capacity is never
enough;)
Though the UK box (with the US also on it) is struggling too. Maybe, like
old times, we'll have to get them to 'schedule' their invoicing and
picking to certain times of the day and have countries in different time
zones sharing boxes!

cheers,

Clare

Larry Bolhuis wrote:

I believe they are *HOSED.

You say they are maxed on Memory in their machine so that path is used up.

They cannot upgrade the CPU or even interactive without causing the system
to request a new key. In addition they may need i5/OS keys. As was
previously mentioned they may also need keys from the BPCS folks anyway.as
most third party keys also will go bust when the model or feature codes
change.

More disk units MAY help (some) but not likely to be noticeable unless
current disk I/O usage is high (40% or more) This at least won't cause
key pain.

Frankly I put it on the doorstep of companies like Infor for charging
Mon$ter fees for some of these upgrades. Should the customer get the key
for free? ABSOLUTELY NOT because the vendor has to do some work, has value
in their intellectual property and so forth. In addition the customer
continues to get value from the software they are running or they wouldn't
use it. Maybe a one year maintenance charge or something along those line
for the new keys but it needs to be a number that doesn't cause the
C-level folks to pass out.

It's also possible that they could have gotten the keys much cheaper had
they stayed current on maintenance. (Of course maintenance isn't free
either and those charges too can be out of line.) We often see the charge
for new keys exceeding the cost of the hardware, sometimes many times
over. In one case a customer, hmmm BPCS, was told their $70K hardware
upgrade would trigger a $1.3M (YES $1,300,000.00) software charge!!! This
included NO new version, NO new function, NO additional users, JUST KEYS.
I don't care who you are this cannot be justified. Wonder why some people
leave i? Well this is one reason.

Not all software vendors get the fact that one i can run many things, all
at one time and in concert one with another. As a result they price their
software only by machine size and not by usage. This forces customers to
move lightly used applications to other platforms where they can get a
smaller one 'cheap'. Then the customer is faced with integration and
communications issues between these multiple servers - problems they
don't have when all the components run together on i. Truthfully there
aren't many applications that can't be priced by usage one way or another.

Unfortunately this has the effect of lowering the number of customers for
the software vendor AND the i. To compensate the answer is often 'Raise
Prices' which......

- Larry

Subject
Upgrade woes

Hi again,

Does anybody know of a way to upgrade a 720 within the 720 range without
ending up with no operating system?? I have a client in China who are
maxed out on a 2062 and desperately need more memory and more
interactive capacity. However they missed getting their upgrade order
(to 2063) in under the wire when IBM recently decided not to honour OS
keys when people upgrade old hardware. They can't upgrade to a newer box
because they are stuck with the model their BPCS Key works on, unless
they pay telephone numbers to SSA/Infor for a new key.
Any ideas?????

thanks,

Clare
.