Re: Informix Pricing

Stuart Litel writes: |> Last week I was down in Florida to meet with Informix and a local company and |> the salesperson from Informix we met with said something very interesting... |> |> Informix is going to User Based Pricing.... Yes. |> What does this mean - well all Informix products will be sold as a bundle |> where it would include SQL, 4GL and the engine and sold for a price of |> $1200 per user for development regardless of the machine! Wrong. It means that rather than worrying about machine classes and user bands, you just worry about how many users you need to support and pay for that. There is one caveat with this, in that for various machines the minimum number of users you can buy is specified. For example, you would not be able to buy a 1 uers license for a Sequent box. It is completely incorrect that the products are sold as a bundle. If you want OnLine DSA, the cost is $X per user. If you want 4gl, it is $Y per user. If you want OnLine DSA *and* 4gl for the same number of users, you would pay #users*($X+$Y). In your particular case, that may come out to $1200/user. But bundling is completely different from user based pricing. |> How interesting -> what happens if you want to get both the compiled version |> and RDS? You would buy both, each for a given number of users. |> BTW, I was also informed of the following: |> 1) The runtime would be $900 per user The exact cost depends on the product. Again, you may have been quoted a price by the salesperson representing the cumulative costs for the products you are interested in. As always, a run time version is generally less expensive than a development version. |> 2) The software also cam e fully bundled and not only included the above, but |> also I-Net! With release 6.0 of tools and servers, connectivity is built in. So you no longer have to buy I-Net and I-Star ***WHEN USING 6.0 OR LATER RELEASES***. If you wish to use 4.10 4gl with OnLine 6.0 DSA, you *will* need I-Net, even if they are on the same machine (due to the change in communication mechanisms). However, a 6.0-compatible version of 4gl will be released soon. This will essentially be the 4.12 version of 4gl with the 6.0 communication library. You will *not* need I-Net to use this version, but also note that it will NOT work with pre-6.0 servers. |> 3) The is no MINIMUM officially (# of users) by the sales people were told to |> try and shy away from deals of less then 5 development users. This is incorrect. Some platforms, as I mention above, have a minimal number of users you must be licensed for. Dave Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this message are not those of Informix Software, its partners or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight. **************************************************************************** "I look back with some satisfaction on what an idiot I was when I was 25, but when I do that, I'm assuming I'm no longer an idiot." - Andy Rooney