IBM Announcement : some System z software withdrawals

Today IBM announces some System z software withdrawals : 'Software withdrawal: IBM System z selected products - Some replacements available (ZP11-0602)'. There's a couple of softwares I would like to mention here. It's about withdrawal from marketing dates, so it's about last dates you can order these softwares. So, of course, this is just a reminder for those very few who are not always up to date and still want to order these products.

The first one is IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer for DB2® for z/OS V1.1. This one will be WDFM on December 12, 2011. It will be replaced by the new Netezza solution : IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator for z/OS V2.1, which was announced along with a lot of other products on October 12 of this year. This complements an earlier announcement with the hardware withdrawal of the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer (ISAOPT) feature on the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX) (ZG11-0350). This also means that this Netezza Solution is running on Netezza hardware and no longer on the zBX. This strikes me as being completely against the entire argumentation IBM built up so carefully in favor of using the zBX as opposed to loosely coupled distributed solutions, no ?

A couple of other softwares being WDFM are :

• IBM z/VM 5.4 on March 12, 2012
• IBM z/VM 6.1 on November 28, 2012
• IBM z/VSE 4.3 on June 25, 2012
• IBM DB2 for z/OS 9.1 on December 10, 2012
• IBM PSF for z/OS 4.3 on September 30, 2012