Re: The price of doing business with IBM?

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 4:12 AM, Ian Michael Gumby <im_gumby@hotmail.com>wrote: > > > > From: neil.truby@ardenta.com > > Subject: Re: The price of doing business with IBM? > > Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:17:34 +0100 > > To: informix-list@iiug.org > > > > "Fernando Nunes" <domusonline@gmail.com> wrote in message > > news:gs5qtj$vvu$1@news.motzarella.org... > > > > > What also makes the benchmark prices so nice is that they're using > "term > > > licensing". It means that the customer would be able to use the > software > > > only during 3 years. IBM AFAIK doesn't have this kind of licensing. > This > > > cuts the license costs in half. > > > > I'm not an apologist for Gumby and I don't really want to be thought of > as > > advocating all of his views. But on this one he's right; Oracle is much > > cheaper at the low end benchmark example cited. > > IBM's licensing is all based upon a perpetual licence. But I'm not sure > how > > you infer that to mean that this halves IBM's price. The IBM price of > > course stays the same; I suppose you could argue that after 3 years you > have > > to buy the Oracle licensing all over again whereas you don't with Oracle, > > > and so it doubles the Oracle price ... > > > > LOL... That's funny. > > Gee thanks Neil. > > I don't know where Fernando gets the concept of a 'term maintenance' > contract. > According to the documents on the TPC.org it looks like Oracle's > maintenance is an estimate is 3 1 year terms to get a 3 year 'TCO'. > You don't? Re-read Mark email with more attention. SE1 is 5.800 per socket. The TPC report has 2.900 * 2 for a system with 2 sockets. If you don't find this weird, than you really need to read it again, more carefully. I'm not talking about the maintenance part. Its unfortunate that there are a few IBMers who will try to spin the numbers > rather than try to address the problem. > If you think I'm one of those IBMers you need to read my post once again, and try to understand this time. If someone spins the numbers I believe it's not me (nor IBM). Do you know many customers buying licenses for 3 years? And what do they do after 3 years? Dump the application or buy new licenses? This idea should really be nice for enterprise versions of the software. I believe it will make benchmarks look a lot better ;) Neil and Captain already pointed that if the numbers are the ones given, Informix is not the cheapest in this kind of hardware. I never wrote the contrary. -- Fernando Nunes Portugal http://informix-technology.blogspot.com My email works... but I don't check it frequently...

On Apr 16, 6:45 am, Fernando Nunes <domusonl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I don't know where Fernando gets the concept of a 'term maintenance' > > contract. > > According to the documents on the TPC.org it looks like Oracle's > > maintenance is an estimate is 3 1 year terms to get a 3 year 'TCO'. > > You don't? Re-read Mark email with more attention. SE1 is 5.800 per socket. > The TPC report has 2.900 * 2 for a system with 2 sockets. > If you don't find this weird, than you really need to read it again, more > carefully. > I did. Here's a quote from an earlier post in the thread: " Thanks for making our point Mark. Hopefully Jerry K et al are watching this thread. If not, I'm sure that the more people attending the IIUG conference drives this exact price point home. To be fair, I did print out the data from the TPC-C benchmark and sorry Mark the price didn't add up. The $5800 listed was for both sockets which was 8 cores. The reason that the maintenance cost looks goofy is that they also included the Oracle OS's 3 year maintenance. Even still, its a 5:1 price difference, until you look at the cost of conversion so the real issue isn't that you could convince an Informix shop to migrate, but that you could convince a customer in the SMB space to go with Oracle over IDS. And thats the key. " -=- As you can see I did catch the price difference. Also Captain Pendantic also caught it. This goes back to my original question which started this thread. $5800 for a license on a 2 socket 8 core xeon system? ;-) That's why I wanted to 1) confirm the oracle price, and 2) compare the IBM IDS price... This is also why I asked if you could compare IDS (workgroup) against Oracle 10g (base edition). The numbers in the TPC-C benchmark didn't add up and even when Mark points out the initial numbers, 11K vs 70K still don't look good. I agree with Neil that in some cases IBM's IDS prices are out of whack and that its possible to find examples. However this box shouldn't be one of those exceptions. A 2 socket server motherboard is pretty standard. So too are 4 core cpus. > I'm not talking about the maintenance part. > > Its unfortunate that there are a few IBMers who will try to spin the numbers > > > rather than try to address the problem. > > If you think I'm one of those IBMers you need to read my post once again, > and try to understand this time. If someone spins the numbers I believe it's > not me (nor IBM). You're the one talking about term licensing. The benchmark is using a 3 year period for determining the cost of the system. Not just acquisition cost but also cost for maintaining the system. I mean you could sell the software at a steep discount to your competitors only to have a much higher maintenance stream. So on paper you make the benchmark prices look better than what they really are. Hence the inclusion of the maintenance price to give a more 'realistic' price. ;-) I agree that customers don't just buy a system for 3 years. But do you really want to get in to the accounting issues if you're talking about 7+ years? And you really do bring up a very good point. People don't buy systems for just the short term. Hence, gaps in the pricing and miscues like this are not good. Once a customer chooses a platform, its a lot harder to convince them to shift and if they do shift, what happens is that they continue to use the old software for legacy and the new software for new development. Its not like changing hardware vendors. > Neil and Captain already pointed that if the numbers are the ones given, > Informix is not the cheapest in this kind of hardware. I never wrote the > contrary. > No. But you're trying to defend or spin the numbers by claiming that Oracle used term licensing. They didn't. What they did do was use the wrong price. Clearly the $5800 is per socket and not for both sockets as suggested by the benchmark documentation. Imagine the potential customers thinking that they're getting a great deal on Oracle only to find out that when they buy the software, its twice the anticipated amount. So now they're getting a good deal. And lets be fair. For the bulk of the database backed applications out there, you can run Oracle and not have any real problems. It may be less elegant than Informix, but it works well enough. Its in the higher end systems that you see Informix out perform. Again, I have to reiterate this point. If IBM wants the SMB space, then they have to price for the SMB space.

> > No. But you're trying to defend or spin the numbers by claiming that > Oracle used term licensing. They didn't. The benchmark does use term licensing. That's why I sent the term licensing details - 3 years is 50% of list.

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Mark Townsend <markbtownsend@sbcglobal.net>wrote: > > > > > No. But you're trying to defend or spin the numbers by claiming that > > Oracle used term licensing. They didn't. > > The benchmark does use term licensing. That's why I sent the term > licensing details - 3 years is 50% of list. > _______________________________________________ > Informix-list mailing list > Informix-list@iiug.org > http://www.iiug.org/mailman/listinfo/informix-list > I rest my case. And it's not just this particular benchmark. Maybe being Mark to say this Gumby will believe it. Sometimes I really feel my English is very bad... I can't get Gumby to understand nothing of what I write... And we all know his IQ is undoubtedly very high. Since the subjects are usually very simple it must be the way I express myself... But one thing I concede: This "term licensing" achieves completely its objectives. A person with a very high IQ could not understand the trick even after being told! Regards. -- Fernando Nunes Portugal http://informix-technology.blogspot.com My email works... but I don't check it frequently...

> From: markbtownsend@sbcglobal.net > Subject: Re: The price of doing business with IBM? > Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:20:11 -0700 > To: informix-list@iiug.org > > > > > > No. But you're trying to defend or spin the numbers by claiming that > > Oracle used term licensing. They didn't. > > The benchmark does use term licensing. That's why I sent the term > licensing details - 3 years is 50% of list. Really? Then Oracle is trying to be a bit tricky. If you're talking about 'term licensing' then the spreadsheet is wrong. "Description Part Number Brand Unit Price Qty Extended Price 3 yr. Maint. Price" "Database Server Support 4 2,300 3 6,900" Thats the quote from the actual .pdf submitted by HP and Oracle to the TPC.org. Here's a link: http://www.tpc.org/results/FDR/TPCC/HP_DL370_G6_OEL_TPCC_FDR.pdf To clean it up... Description: Database Server Support Part Number: (null value) Brand: 4 Unit Price: 2,300 Qty: 3 Extended Price: (null value) 3 yr. Maint. Price: 6,900 If this is a 'term' pricing, then its very misleading because as presented in the .pdf, it shows as a single year price for 3 years. Not a single 3 year term contract. Big difference. It should read qty 1, unit price: 6,900, and 3 yr. Maint Price 6,900. Or you could describe it as 'Database Server Support 3yr Term', which would also be more precise and then it would infer that the cost breakdown per year is 1/3rd of the contract. Since Mark is the Oracle wonk, I'll defer it to him on Oracle pricing. Splitting hairs? Maybe. But the point is that we need to understand what these numbers are. BTW, if you check on that link and look at the pricing numbers... the total software price is $5800 covering both sockets, not per socket. So Mark, is this a mistake or is it really $2900 per quad core cpu? -G _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Life without walls. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_allup_1b_explore_042009