Re: Informix ASSURANCE

David Harold Lipschitz (David@lipdav.demon.co.uk) wrote: : Informix Assurance: : In the uk Informix sell you software at a certain price, and then add 12% : assurance on top of that. This 12% is supposed to be telephone support : for a certain period - I think a year. You don't get telephne support with assurance. : So for instance I am buying an ESQL-C developer's license. This will cost : me 235 pounds - which is a ridiculous price since I _only_ want : INet and I believe that should be free with the database server. I'm curious about the price you've been quoted. Are you talking about DOS/Windows or Unix? How many users licence? If Unix, what class of machine. You can just buy I-Net without buying ESQL/C. : But the catch is that the minimum assurance price is 200 pounds. : So I (the company) ends up paying 235 + 200 + VAT (VAT = UK Sales tax) There has been some confusion over this. I asked Informix once and was quoted 200 minimum... then later was told that, when buying through a distributor it is 12%, no minimum. : That is more than double the original quoted price! I haven't been happy with Informix's pricing policy for some time now. With the re-classification of the low-end machine licencing, and general price re-structuring, the list price of the products I deal with have increased over 112% in the last 2 years! I made a calculation of the value of all the V4.10 products I have purchased. It came to around 45,000. Then, taking into account machine classes, numbers of users distruibuted across the network, AND the Informix definition of a user, I discovered that the cost of the same software for V6 appoached 250,000!!!! -- --- Paul Mahoney, X-Act Solutions Limited smail: Owlsmead, Meads Road, Little Common, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex TN39 4SY email: ptm@xact.demon.co.uk ... pmahoney@cix.compulink.co.uk