Re: OS V6R1

Joe,

Your reasoning sounds great. There are a few "on the ground" issues to overcome.

1) When a long standing pricing model changes, usually the vendor feels like they would make more money using that method. It's the customer that's paying more.

2) By your logic, even you would be OK (ROI wise) if IBM charged three times the current rate, right? All you need to do is change "Does RDP save you 20 minutes a week?" to "Does RDP save you 1 hour a week?" to justify it! I don't think that reasoning would fly in too many shops.

3) The vast majority of basic development tools from IBM over the history of the IBM midrange (at least from the S/34 on, that I can think of) were bundled together. When that changes you can expect major resistance from the people that hold the keys to the purse strings.

4) The "one time cost" claim is not really accurate, since unbundling allows IBM to directly and separately base maintenance fees on the list price, which is ongoing.


-mark

At 6/3/10 05:18 PM, you wrote:

Buck wrote:
> Rational chose not to give entitlements, so a company that wants to
> outfit 8 developers with RDP will pay the full purchase price for 8
> copies of RDP plus the annual maintenance. The quoted price for RDP at
> the time of this note is US$860, which means that if those 8 developers
> want to use RDP, the company needs to write a check for US$6880. Of
> course, the company doesn't need to spend any money (until the annual
> maintenance comes due) if the 8 developers should 'choose' to use ADTS.
>
Just to clarify and expand a little: the last time I checked you could
still move from ADTS to RDi for a percentage of the full price (around
60%). That would reduce your one-time cutover cost to a little over
$4000. For eight developers, that's about $520 a head. Even if your
developers are only getting $30 an hour, that's 17 hours to payback.
Does RDP save you 20 minutes a week? If so, you've recouped that one
time cost inside a year. It's really not that hard a value proposition
(heck, even with the full price, it's less than $900 a head per person -
and it's a one time cost).

On the other hand, if your company doesn't care about your productivity
and only considers you an expense to be minimized, then you're going to
lose this particular battle. But you'll also probably be working on
tiny monitors on underpowered machines, so you're better off with ADTS
anyway.

Joe