IBM EMEA Gives Killer i License And SWMA After-License Deals

June 10, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are an IBM i shop sitting on a relatively old box that is no longer on maintenance and you want to get back on Software Maintenance while also moving to a new Power7 or Power7+ system, then IBM‘s EMEA region has two deals for you. And if you use them both, you will only spend $2 instead of thousands to possibly many tens of thousands of dollars.

Both of the deals, which were announced on May 30 and then quickly updated on June 5 are part of IBM’s 25-year Power i anniversary celebration, and I also think perhaps an indicator that the Power Systems-IBM i business in Europe is not, like other server platforms, doing as well as might be hoped.

In announcement letter ZA13-1122, IBM is offering a license fee discount for companies that want to move their IBM i licenses from an existing machine to a new Power 720, Power 720+, Power 740, or Power 740+ server. You can also buy a PureFlex modular system with Flex p260, Flex 260+, Flex 460, or Flex 460+ nodes if you are going that route. The discount only applies if you stay in the same P05 or P10 software tier for the IBM i platform, but if you do jump tiers, you have to pay the incremental upgrade cost between the tiers for the IBM i license once you transfer it from the old to the new iron. You have to have the same customer number on the machines for the old and new boxes, too, if you want to get the deal.

Anyway, under the promotion, if you do a deal between May 30 and September 30 this year, the license transfer fee of all customers drops to $1 in U.S. currency. If you do a deal between October 1 and December 31, then you are only going to get a 50 percent break on the license transfer fee.

In announcement letter ZA13-1121, IBM is giving a similarly generous deal to customers who have let their Software Maintenance on their machines lapse. If you buy one of the new machines listed above and you want to transfer your licenses rather than buy new ones, you would be dinged with after-license fees to get your support current. But under this deal, if you get a new machine between now and December 31, the after-license fee for SWMA, as IBM calls it (and it is pronounced “swah-ma”), is $1 in greenbacks. That’s it. This deal is available for P05, P10, and P20 software tiers, which represent the bulk of the OS/400 and IBM installed base at this point.