Grumpy maybe, right on definitely! 


Kelly J. Lipp
VP Manufacturing & CTO
STORServer, Inc.
485-B Elkton Drive
Colorado Springs, CO 80907
719-266-8777
lipp AT storserver DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Allen S. Rout
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 10:14 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Pricing model for 5.4

>> On Wed, 7 Feb 2007 10:11:03 +1000, Steven Harris
<steve AT STEVENHARRIS DOT INFO> said:

> Again, the product has not been enhanced to automatically collect and 
> maintain this information, providing a significant overhead for 
> administrators and a lack of assurance that licencing is *ever* 
> correct.  Sure IBM has the right to change their licencing model, but 
> they should also provide tools to do the job efficiently and 
> effectively and provide an audit function to allow customers to know 
> they are correctly licensed.


I expect that they will offer the function you describe with the same
despatch they displayed w.r.t. per-processor licensing.  In their
defense, I understand why they don't want to put developers on this kind
of work: their license schemes chance more quickly than they could get a
new tool to market.

Since we can prove we can never know the right number, I suggest not
worring about it too much, making a reasonable stab at it, and being
prepared to argue with your business partner.  And don't be afraid to
say "Virtualization!"  (with the same sort of affect as "Boo!" at
halloween) when they walk into the room.  That ought to give you
-years- of smokescreen.



My uninformed estimate is that TSM has their organizational hands tied
by some larger marketing effort for Tivoli-brand-wide licensing
standards unification.  Since these are acknowledged marketing fantasies
anyway, the Tivoli folks are not concerned with actual measuring,
because the list price is only interesting as an initial bargaining
position. When the error-bars on the offered price are 40%,
+/- 10% processor count gets lost in the noise.  If they ever tried to
extract list price * processor units, they'd get laughed out of the
room, and they know it.

Worse yet, if they made measurement straightforward, then Backup Exec
would run "The IBM-supplied costing tool" against some pile of hardware,
multiply it by IBM list price, and have a very reasonable claim to have
arrived at an IBM approved cost number, at which they could throw smelly
objects on YouTube or some other high-visibility location.

So we end up with licensing that is not only opaque by design, but also
measured against a nearly irrelevant basis (for TSM, you count
processors?).  I construe that as a statement by Tivoli management that
we don't need to get the measures any more right than they do, and we
can correct course at triannual marketing meetings.



- Allen S. Rout
- Can you tell I'm grumpy about this?