Re: IBM is so confusing!

Not to add fuel to the fire here but I have encountered an interesting twist in just the past 2-3 years. It isn't only initial licensing that appears to be a area where IBM has turned to recover some development cost, it is SWMA as well. I have a developer lease so I get some pretty substantial discounts but the past three years I haven't gotten any notice of the SWMA lapsing and further, with the OS and *some* individual licensing of products it has gotten more and more difficult to figure out which products have individual SWMA and which are covered by SWMA on the OS. Thus, IBM can charge higher prices for reinstating SWMA (three times higher with RDp for instance). As a business partner, I sometimes don't receive an IBM notice when my customer's SWMA is expiring. They have to pay for reinstatement as well. Thankfully, the distributor I work with has a better system than IBM to notify me of customer SWMA that is expiring. But, heaven help you if you deal with IBM directly and assume that they will notify you when your SWMA expires because they won't.

Of course I could concoct some conspiracy theory but I think that IBM has no economic incentive to notify of expiring SWMA because they can charge for reinstatement. Every software license program I participate in has some kind of notification system to alert me to expiring support. All except IBM. Seems like the only company that isn't "smarter" on this planet, is IBM. Don't get me wrong I LOVE this platform and IBM support is top notch, but the systems that notify of expiration and allow us to pay for SWMA are archaic at best and don't reflect well on IBM.

I don't know what your experience has been, but I have never received a notice from IBM that my SWMA was expiring. I usually discover that it expired when I need to update something, as I just did (which triggered the rant)

Pete Helgren
Value Added Software, Inc
www.asaap.com
www.opensource4i.com


On 2/10/2011 9:17 AM, Joe Pluta wrote:

On 2/10/2011 8:38 AM, Buck wrote:

It will cost me cash money to move from WDSC 7.0.0.8 to RDp. I can move
from WDSC to SEU 7.1 without spending cash because of my entitlements.
Don't look for a pdf describing your savings, I don't think there's a
scenario that fits us. At least I haven't come across it yet.

Just to be clear, you're not moving from WDSC to RDP or SEU. You're
either staying on ADTS, which has been stabilized, or you're moving from
ADTS to RDP. I think it sucks that IBM is charging to move from ADTS to
RDP, but that's what it is.

The reason I bring up this distinction is that RDP has significantly
less functionality than WDSC. In fact, in order to get equivalent WDSC
functionality you have to create a workbench with RDP and RAD (Rational
Applicaiton Developer). This is one of the things I'm going to talk
about when I present to the OMNI user group Tuesday night.

I'm selling my management on a simple price shuffling, where Rational
and IBM are allocating product costs where they belong rather than bury them elsewhere.

This is an accurate statement. WDSC was free, and that's a model that
was unsustainable. :)

If Rational sees a revenue stream from IBM i customers, that has to be a
good thing versus us being an anonymous aggregate.
--buck

It absolutely is a good thing to be able to point to specific revenue to
justify the costs of further enhancements on the RPG and COBOL tools for
the i.

Joe