Maybe It Was April Fools In Some Cases: Price Cuts For Selected Power Systems

April 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

What goes up sometimes comes back down again. We have been chronicling the successive price increases that IBM has been levying on Power Systems, storage, and various software and services products throughput 2024 and into early 2025 to help you keep track of it all. And now, we have an actual price decrease in selected areas.

Don’t get too excited. It probably does not apply to you, and the four cumulative and multiplicative broad price increases we have seen in the past year almost certainly still do.

To recap: IBM raised prices in April 2024, then in September 2024, and then again in December 2024 for parts of the Power System stack, which includes related Storage products and services. These three price increases took effect before the two price changes that were announced in March of this year that went into effect yesterday, April 1. This is no joke. . . . and it is the sixth major price change in a year from Big Blue affecting Power Systems customers in some way or another; there were other ones that were more tangential, as you see in the Related Stories section below.

This one is at least in the right direction.

In announcement letter AD25-0944, dated April 1 and effective that same day, IBM decreased prices on Power Systems servers and Storage products in several countries, which are outlined in this Excel spreadsheet. April 1 is the day that those two other sets of price increases announced in March on Power Systems and Storage products were raised. If you are getting whiplash from all this, you are no doubt not alone. The price decreases are due to foreign exchange rates relative to the US dollar and are as follows:

Japanese yen, -0.8 percent
Sweden krona, -1.1 percent
Poland zloty, -2.9 percent
Thailand baht, -3.2 percent

The price changes affect various scale-up and scale-out Power9 and Power10 servers, rack components, FlashSystem and DS8K arrays, SAN Virtual Controllers, and a slew of tape drives and tape libraries in those countries.

By the way, in September 2024 IBM increased prices for foreign exchange harmonization for many countries but for these four it was:

Japanese yen, 4.1 percent
Sweden krona, 5.7 percent
Poland zloty, 4.8 percent
Thailand baht, 2.4 percent

So, IBM raised a bunch and then gave only a little bit of that back, except in Thailand, where it wiped out the price hike and gave even more back.

But wait, that is not all.

In announcement letter AD25-0857, IBM has chopped pricing on all software sold through the Passport Advantage and Passport Advantage Express channels by 9 percent. This price cut was announced on April 1 and took effect that day.

We will say it once again: It should be illegal to not publish a full price list. Trying to figure out what anything costs after so many price hikes that are multiplicative is not easy, and this has to be driving customers and partners alike a little bit nuts. In general, prices are going up, and after tariffs kick in on hardware manufactured overseas, we are pretty sure IBM will pass some of those costs on, too. This ain’t over, particularly with Power Systems being built in Guadalajara, Mexico.

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