@Timothy, these are serious questions. I hope you didn't think I was being sarcastic. You say "I encourage ISVs that are presently relying on key-based approaches to, instead, take advantage of these new SCRT capabilities." I would love to go to my management with an alternative to keys, but I don't know how I would answer the two questions below. The first bullet below is (IMHO obviously) the number one reason vendors implement keys -- outright theft sure, but actually probably more likely, inadvertent LPAR creep. The second bullet is in fact why I -- when I was a CEO -- implemented keys.
Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Charles Mills Sent: Friday, April 21, 2017 7:20 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Vendor Licensing Frustrations And how would implementing SCRT solve what I see as a vendor's two most pressing concerns that are often addressed with "keys": - Is this or some other customer running this product on some CPU that we have no knowledge about? - This customer has been running a "30-day" trial of our product for nine months now. How do we get them to move "finalizing a license" to the top of their task list rather than letting it languish under "we have not had time to do that yet"? Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Timothy Sipples Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2017 10:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Vendor Licensing Frustrations I'd like to refer everyone to the z/OS 2.3 preview announcement: https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/5/897/ENUS217-085/ENUS217-085.PDF As mentioned in the preview, IBM plans to add the Sub-Capacity Reporting Tool (SCRT) to the base z/OS operating system and also to allow Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and their customers to generate ISV-unique SCRT reports. There are already some ISVs that have tools and products that "reference" another product -- a CICS tool vendor that charges according to the SCRT reported CICS utilization, for example. Assuming IBM is able to follow through on its plans for SCRT, SCRT would be able to track individual ISV product utilizations directly. I encourage ISVs that are presently relying on key-based approaches to, instead, take advantage of these new SCRT capabilities if/when IBM ships them. The basic idea is that your customers would generate and send SCRT reports per normal, including to you. Then, if you didn't get a report for a particular month, you'd have a contractually pre-agreed process to follow which might, in due course, involve sending a bill. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
