Re: IBM is so confusing!

Joe,

Sorry it's taken me a while to get back to this. I was out of the office
for a while and then my e-mail was down a good chunk of the day.

Yes, I'm certain there is not per-seat charge for ADTS. We originally
licensed our compilers on a P-20 box tier. Hence, we have an abundance of
entitlements to all the tools (except, of course, RDP). (Incidentally,
our BP still offered us a discount on trading ADTS entitlements in toward
RDP. Perhaps that's changed since we got the information a few months
ago.)

About 2 years ago, we upgraded our box and had the option to include going
to 6.1 in the upgrade. Because we were concerned about the licensing
costs of all our per-seat entitlements--especially the on-going
maintenance of them, we stuck with V5R4.

Our developers are slated to get PC-upgrades to Windows 7 soon. Because
WDSC is not supported on Windows 7, we needed to find out what it would
cost to get us on RDP. While we were at it, we wanted to get projections
on the cost of all the development tools--we aren't going to keep going
back to our management/directors asking for more and more money--they
would rather get the whole picture up front and make the decision.

We did a conference call around November of the past year (2010) with our
business partner and got the pricing. I specifically asked about the SWMA
on per-seat compilers and ADTS. They were insistent that there was not
cost and that there was no savings by trying to drop any of those
entitlements. Since I had heard different, I pushed the point and they
agreed to check with IBM via their channels. A day or so later, they
called back and confirmed that there is no per-seat maintenance on the
host tools. Perhaps this is all based on our account and history, but it
seemed like our BP was saying they had never heard about per-seat SWMA on
the host tools.

Michael

wdsci-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 02/11/2011 10:11:13 AM:

----- Message from Joe Pluta<joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on Fri, 11
Feb 2011 07:05:24 -0600 -----

. . .
. . .
. . .

It was my understanding that SWMA would be based on your total OS price,
which included the per-seat costs of ADTS seats. That's what I was
told, although I haven't priced it out. George Farr was pretty clear on
the point during the 6.1 rollout, but that was a long time ago and
things may have changed.

I wrote an article based entirely on conversations with George Farr who
was very involved with the whole pricing situation:

http://www.mcpressonline.com/programming/dev-tools/ad-repackaging-in-v6r1.html
. . .
. . .
. . .

Are you certain that ADTS seats are not being charged SWMA by seat? If
so, I'll have to take your word for it until I check one out myself. I
hesitate to actually bug IBM; if this is just an oversight I'd hate to
be the one to bring it to their attention!

It is, I suppose, entirely possible that IBM decided not to charge SWMA
on individual ADTS seats for customers who upgrade from pre-6.1
releases. Or maybe they're not charging SWMA on ADTS seats at all, even
for new customers. I just don't know. I do know that we were all quite
miffed about the compilers being licensed by seat, so maybe they decided
it was too difficult and just dropped the whole SWMA by seat for any of
the host-based products. Nothing IBM does in the licensing department
would surprise me.

Joe