What sort of "encoding" does the software do? Licensing based on capacity (as measured in MSUs) is generally preferred. Ideally, as JC says, that would be the peak 4 hour rolling average MSUs for your product itself across all the LPARs where your product is running. However, depending on what your product does, you can use a product "proxy." For example, if your product performs some sort of encoding exclusively for DB2, then you could base your licensing on the peak 4HRA MSUs for DB2 across the DB2 LPARs where your product is also running. Or it might make sense to use z/OS MSUs as the proxy -- it depends on what your product does.
You can price software any way you want of course. But peak 4HRA MSU pricing seems to work pretty well for both vendor and customer. Many vendors offer a price "curve." That is, the first MSU has the highest price, then each additional MSU has a progressively lower price. There's a lot of debate about the wisdom of that, but quantity discounts (price curves) generally (unfortunately?) reflect vendor costs better than flat pricing. (There are certain fixed costs to doing business with each individual customer.) For "One-Time Charge" (OTC) z/OS-based software IBM does this using something called "Value Unit Exhibits" -- for example, "VUE007." IBM sets a single price per Value Unit, and MSUs are converted to Value Units according to the Value Unit Exhibit (a formula). The Value Unit Exhibit is what applies the curve. IBM's Value Unit Exhibits are public information, so anybody can price using the same formulas if they wish. VUE007 is the most common exhibit, as a matter of fact. As an aside, in my experience customers dislike -- OK, hate -- license keys. I'm not a fan of them either. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
