The Price Tweaking Continues For Power Systems
August 18, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I have said it before and I will say it again: If you think you can keep track of IBM’s pricing for hardware, software, and services given all the ups and downs with pricing, you have a better encyclopedic mind and spreadsheet than we do.
In recent weeks, Big Blue has been at it again with the red grease pencil, making changes in the Power Systems and Storage hardware product lines. Both of the price changes we report on today actually were announced in early July and took effect immediately. They were buried in our torrent of email and I didn’t see them until I did a manual review of IBM’s announcements upon our return from vacation in northern Michigan – yes, they let Nittany Lions and Buckeyes cross the state border and spend some time on the lakes and rivers – and from dropping our middle daughter off at college. (It has been a busy couple of months. And for the curious, Chloe is attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study history with a desire to teach. History might be the most important thing any of us can study right now. Perhaps medicine.)
In any event, in announcement letter AD25-1246, dated July 1, IBM did another one of those foreign exchange price normalizations for the Power Systems and Storage divisions. The price cuts range from a low of 1 percent for South Africa to a high of 9.9 percent for Sweden as follows:
- South Africa, -1.0 percent
- Hong Kong, -1.1 percent
- China, -1.4 percent
- India, -2.1 percent
- Thailand, -3.0 percent
- Brunei, -3.3 percent
- Singapore, -3.3 percent
- Canada, -3.8 percent
- Philippines, -3.8 percent
- South Korea, -4.2 percent
- New Zealand, -4.9 percent
- Poland, -5.1 percent
- Japan, -5.2 percent
- Malaysia, -5.4 percent
- United Kingdom, -6.5 percent
- Switzerland, -6.7 percent
- Taiwan, -7.4 percent
- Morocco, -7.7 percent
- Norway, -8.0 percent
- Denmark, -9.0 percent
- European Union, -9.1 percent
- Czech Republic, -9.5 percent
- Sweden, -9.9 percent
The price changes affect Power9 and Power10 systems as well as the full complement of flash, disk, and tape storage sold by IBM around the world. The full set of hardware that are effected by this price decrease is listed in this spreadsheet.
In announcement letter AD25-1253, IBM cut the price to zero for registrations on Power Software listed under a slew of product numbers from 5771-Z11 to 5775-Z12. Prices used to range from $1,783 for a one-year registration to $7,753 for a five year registration. But here’s the funny bit: Damned if we can find out what this software actually is from the Sales Manual. If you know, let us know and we will append. The link for the feature codes is here.
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It appears that 5771Z11 is HMC Vir Appl x86 Sub 1Y SWMA, 5772Z11 is HMC Vir Appl x86 Sub 2Y SWMA and so on.
https://www.belldata.com/pdf/IBMPower_SW_PriceRevision_20250101.pdf
Hi Timothy – I believe the mystery products 5771-Z11 to 5775-Z12 are 7/24 uplift applied to the latest Virtual HMC software. What disappeared as a separate line item charge simply got transferred as a feature of the vHMC product instead (ie, cost got shifted in eConfig).