>> On Fri, 8 Jun 2007 12:23:36 -0500, "Bell, Charles (Chip)" <[EMAIL >> PROTECTED]> said:
> Please answer if you in any way are responsible in the management of > TSM licenses at your place of business. I fit the "in any way" characterization. > We were recently audited, as IBM is reaching out to all of their TSM > customers to ensure that they are adhering to the new standard. Oy. 'Reaching out'. How nice. Did they at least leave you with the tools they used to take their count? I still haven't gotten an answer from anyone at IBM about how they think that count should be taken. > What are you guys/gals doing at your place? I'd like a healthy dose > of feedback to get a feel of whether or not there a majority doing > it one way or the other. Your participation is appreciated. We do a total cost recovery thing, of which licensure has been (once upon a time) a minor constituent. I am currently in the process of a really angry conversation with my business partner about the recent license foolishness. To paraphrase the conversation with the partner, I don't care if IBM wants to charge for magical pixie points, which measurement they pull out of some convenient aperture. But their metric should be something the system we purchase can report to us. It would be very nice (he said sweetly) if the license metric had SOME PASSING ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE VALUE PROPOSITION FOR WHICH WE LICENSE THE SOFTWARE. Ahem. If my TSM server reported that I was consuming 23,000 magical pixie points, for which (my IBM rep could tell me) the fee was [foo], then we'd be in a simple price negotiation. To have the license related to an irrelevancy, which we must then do new irrelevant things to evaluate, is an infuriating, timewasting insult. Furthermore, the disconnect between the license terms and the value proposition is sufficiently severe that I have trouble recommending TSM in some situations. Not 'convincing': 'recommending'. When I have to care if my client pops another CPU into their file server, and then find some way to recover that in an equitable fashion... When they've got a database and the license cost is going to double when they add 8 more processors... No change in TSM value proposition, just accounting overhead and more license fees. - Allen S. Rout
