We are negotiating our license pricing right now.  Our client base is
growing significantly, and the price of the client is making management
think they are being taken to the cleaners.

Is there such a thing as a TSM Enterprise Site license?  Our IBM reps
are saying they can put together a single price model for us, but it is
not clear what it would be based on.

Best Regards,

John D. Schneider


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Allen S. Rout
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 10:58 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Question for you


>> On Wed, 23 May 2007 09:27:21 +0200, Dirk Kastens 
>> <Dirk.Kastens AT UNI-OSNABRUECK DOT DE> said:

> I never understood why a backup software is being licensed based on 
> the number or type of the processors. This would be ok for a database 
> or mathematical software but not for a backup software.

When they first moved off the "Server license expensive, client license
cheap" model, the muttering was a harmonization of the TSM product with
the rest of the Tivoli price scheme.

It appears that the flattening of the price scheme was trying to
decrease the amout of "front-end" costs, witness the Express product,
etc.

I think this is a disservice both to the existing clue base and the
product as a whole.  TSM is a superb product but not a trivial one to
run well.  The flattened price scheme encourages little shops to get
into it, badly.

I'm biased on this, running a medium-to-large TSM server for UF campus
and environs, but there are a couple of places on and near campus who've
decided to go roll their own.  I try to help them, but there's a limit
to what I can do.

So people climb into the product for cheap, get bit, get mad, go do
something else.




In any case, the current license scheme is impossible to get right,
expensive to estimate, and not representative of the value received.

There's no reason to base the licensing on something the client can't
estimate, and good reason to base it on something the server can
calculate.  I say let IBM do the legwork.


I wonder how much IBM is paying KPMG to find out "This license scheme is
a burden"?  They coulda had it here for free.


- Allen S. Rout