Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Announcements on price changes for IPLA and MLC softwares on z/OS

Today IBM announced DB2 11, IMS 13 and the DB2 Analytics Accelerator for z/OS V4.1 and I'll surely return to (some of) these in later posts. But there were also a couple of announcements regarding software pricing. And don't turn away yet assuming there's another round of price increases. No there's actually good news too, this time. So, keep on reading.

About the IPLA software there's a list of Websphere products that will see an increase in Belgium of 3% starting on January 1, 2014 : 'Price Changes on Selected System z and zSeries Software Program Products (ZA13-1127)'. As you know I mainly give the details for my own country but do check out the announcement itself to see what will happen in your country.

About the MLC software there's a limited list of softwares that get the same pricing as later versions : 'Price Changes in monthly license charges (MLC) on selected IBM System z Software Products (ZA13-1128)'. We've seen this mechanism before. "With these increases, DB2 for z/OS versions 8 and 9 will cost the same as version 10, IMS versions 10 and 11 will cost the same as version 12, and Enterprise COBOL for z/OS versions 3 and 4 will cost the same as version 5".

But how about the good news then ? Well, Ray Jones (IBM) mentioned it in his keynote speech at the Total Solutions Event last week in Brussels, but here it is in this same announcement : "IBM intends to price the next upcoming version of DB2 and the next upcoming version of IMS equal to the prices of DB2 10 and IMS 12 respectively". This is actually two times good news. First of all, there's no price increase between the two releases. But there's more. When DB2 10 was announced IBM did a large effort to improve the efficiency of DB2, so that the new release not only offered new functionalities but actually consumed less resources. If this happens again with DB2 11, you actually win twice ! And, I refer to Ray Jones once again, the same will now also apply to IMS 13 where the same efforts were now also delivered by the IMS development team.
All in all, this gives you a couple of good reasons to move forward to newer versions of these software products.

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