>Did your total IBM software bill decline or increase during that period?
I didn't get deeply involved in software costs until c. 2008, so it took some digging, but I did find our then current MLC costs c. 2005 when we were on z900s and looking to go to z9s. In short, today, on z10s with vWLC, our monthly MLC cost is about 10% less (in total, all MLC products) than what it was then on the z900s. Now some of that is because we did eliminate a few unused MLC products (such as old compilers) over the past few years, but I believe that those only totalled to something on the order of 2-3% of the monthly cost. If we hadn't done that, and if we were paying full-capacity VWLC, then I believe our cost would be very close to what it was in 2005. But still, no net increase across a 7 year time-period wouldn't be a bad run. Note that I'm not trying to make the case that z/OS and associated products are by any means inexpensive. Nor am I happy about the 6% increase now. Whether the cost is a reasonable value is a much more complicated analysis that is going to be dependent on every organization's particular needs. For some, I'm sure it's not such a good value. Certainly it is a much better value (on a cost/unit of capacity basis) for much larger shops. Oh, and I didn't try to look at zOTC, because that's even more complicated as we've swapped multiple products between IBM and ISVs over that time period as well as eliminated some products. Scott ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
