This is getting pretty ridiculous now, in my view. So let's say that IBM increases a particular price for sake of argument. What does that mean? Well, in effect it means you may be slightly off the financial part of your forecast for the remainder of your ELA. Which means you may be closer or less close to perfect in your capacity forecast relative to the financial one. (If your utilizations are running under forecast, the price increase soaks up some gap and probably the payments don't change, so you're actually closer to perfect. If you're running over, you may have a bit more overage to pay at the end, so you've left some benefit on the table.) A *perfect* forecast maximizes ELA benefits. An "imperfect" forecast...STILL YIELDS ELA BENEFITS!
This isn't a question of whether or not you should have an ELA. You probably should -- "talk with your IBM representative." If perfect is defined as 10 units worth of benefit (with 100% hindsight), sure, maybe you'll "only" get 8 units when the books are closed. Is 8 better than zero benefit? Heck yes! And many organizations like smoothed billing anyway for budgetary reasons, so that's another benefit in many cases. By the way, when IBM announced the Mainframe Charter 10 years ago, it promised to deliver on a few important principles. One of the most important was to improve the value of zSeries (now zEnterprise). Very importantly, IBM did not specify exactly what form those ongoing improvements would take, at least in part because IBM couldn't predict everything. I'm pretty sure IBM didn't predict the DB2 Analytics Accelerator in 2003, for example -- at least not in detail. IBM hasn't issued many charters -- maybe two? -- and I think many observers missed how seriously IBM took (and takes) the Mainframe Charter. OK, fast forward 10 years. We've seen substantial net unit price decreases in myriad forms (speciality engines, more and more business-friendly sub-capacity licensing, accelerators, hardware capacity, memory, maintenance, Capacity for Planned Events, Solution Editions, Value Unit Editions, Rational Unit Test feature, and many others). We've also seen functionality which previously required paying extra now not requiring extra payment -- the WebSphere Liberty Profile in CICS TS V5.1 and IMS Connect are two among many examples. We've seen serious (and ongoing) path length reductions throughout the portfolio -- yes even including COBOL, CICS, and IMS. (Welcome, Enterprise COBOL Version 5.) We've seen IBM compete aggressively but fairly in the tools and utilities market, and on a sub-capacity basis. We've seen price inflation and even some currency devaluations in the world at large, and yes we've even seen IBM raise a few price numbers a bit so that everything is not falling *too* quickly. And, oh yes, we have 5.5 GHz cores! I think this whole picture over the past decade is a very good result. There's lots more value-for-money than there was 10 years ago -- there was a lot even then -- and IBM continues to be well positioned to keep delivering on the Mainframe Charter's promises. Anybody who wants to trade today for 10 years ago, raise your hand. :-) Writing only for myself. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples GMU VCT Architect Executive (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
