Re: The price of doing business with IBM?

Ian Michael Gumby wrote: > > Sucks to be an Informix bigot, no? Eyepoppingly, I heard a rumour that despite the credit crunch and everyone else having lowered their prices, IBM has had a price increase again this year. It's enough to drive a man to drink, if he didn't already. -- Cheers, Obnoxio The Clown http://obotheclown.blogspot.com The following is a disclaimer and a protest at the collection, retention and sharing of my personal mail by the morally bankrupt state. By adding a string of key words, it will guarantee that each and every mail that I send will now need to be manually viewed as it is picked up by the auto scan software. If every person in the UK does exactly the same, then the entire system will quickly become so unmanageable, so unwieldy that it will become unworkable. Key words: bomb, assassinate, president, brown, Osama, Obama, Sarkozy, Merkel, government, target, location, rocket, grenade, al-Qaeda, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, UK, America, guns, jets, bombs, machine-gun, terrorists, MP's, pigs, troughs, France, Germany, Italy, nuclear, Korea. PPS If you are reading this because you've picked up the above keywords: I hope your parents are proud of what you have become. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by OpenProtect(http://www.openprotect.com), and is believed to be clean.

"Obnoxio The Clown" <obnoxio@serendipita.com> wrote in message news:mailman.541.1239752958.1831.informix-list@iiug.org... > Ian Michael Gumby wrote: >> >> Sucks to be an Informix bigot, no? > > Eyepoppingly, I heard a rumour that despite the credit crunch and everyone > else having lowered their prices, IBM has had a price increase again this > year. > > It's enough to drive a man to drink, if he didn't already. Well ... Taking 100 PVUs (1 core of a Sparc VII processor, or 2 of an Intel processor) as the benchmark, the "BL" band price (the price a customer with no or negligible purchaseing history of IBM software in the past) of Workgroup Edition licences, which is what I guess we're talking about if we're discussing "white space", has gone up this year from '7,506 (from memory) to '8,218. But the cost of the HDR option for Workgroup has come down substantially. And the cost of Enterprise has come down this year from '35,300 (again from memory) to '33,600. Also, I have noticed that the cost of maintenance renewals has also come down, at the higher bands at least, by around 3%. So the picture is not that clear. But it does seem odd that Workgroup - which probably represents 75% of our sales by quantity, although obviously not value - has been increased. Also I've had emails from IBM recently addressed to me as I am the Passport Advantage contact for several customers telling me that the licensing rules for "sub-capacity licensing" (that is, running IBM software on virtual servers) have been relaxed substantially. Unfortunately the links it refers to on the IBM website are all broken, and the mail is of a "DO NOT REPLY, OR DIE" type, and there are no alternative contact details given so I haven't been able to find out for myself the extent to which (if at all) Informix is affected, but I understand from one of the IBM UK pre-sales guys that the news is very positive for IDS 11 (although not for earlier releases).