RE: Some fodder for marketing, perhaps -- MIDRANGE-L

Except that IBM never marketed it as $300K off the price if you don't
want 5250.  Instead they said 5250 will cost you $300K.  So it is not a
discount for not having 5250; it is a fee for having it.  ($300K
happened to be Enterprise Edition bump on our 570s.  I know it includes
other LPPs, but we only needed EntEd for 5250 capability; the other LPPs
are not important to us.)

The problem is that IBM took something that was built-in and thus
considered by the customer base to be 'free' and made it an option. An
expensive option.  Yes, they lowered the purchase price of the base
server so that it was initially something of a wash, but over time the
cost of 5250 has become an increasingly higher percentage of the overall
cost of a system. 

Real world example: On each our 2 570s, the price of EntEd/5250 was over
half the total purchase price.  Think about that.  No extra performance.
No extra storage.  No extra capacity whatsoever.  Just the ability to
access programs, data, and CPU cycles via telnet instead of HTTP.  BTW,
the rest of the price included a nice amount of RAM, several TB of disk,
racks & PDUs, IxS cards, LTO3 tape libraries, HMCs, and the OS/400
licenses.  Very nicely loaded systems and yet the ability to type
"TELNET MYSYSTEM" vs. "HTTP://MYSYSTEM" still cost over half the overall
system price.

Believe me, I like the platform as much as anyone on this list, but it
becomes increasingly difficult to sell management on the cost of
upgrades.  Things like the charge for Enterprise Edition will kill the
iSeries at my shop.  It is only a matter of time.

--
John A. Jones, CISSP
Americas Information Security Officer
Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc.
V: +1-630-455-2787  F: +1-312-601-1782
john.jones@xxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 3:43 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Some fodder for marketing, perhaps

midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>   6. RE: Some fodder for marketing, perhaps (Jones, John (US))
>
>I have to ask, what kind of "interactive tax" do unix system vendors
>charge for telnet/VT100/VT220 access?  I don't know for sure, but I
>strongly suspect the answer is $0.


AFAIK, you're right. OTOH, one might easily consider any fees for Oracle
to be a "database tax", etc. It was the user community that took to the
term "interactive tax"; so, I suppose any charges beyond base hardware
and operating system could be called a "[some feature] tax".

If I wanted twinax-style terminals and similar device/controller/SNA
support on a unix system, is it available simply by plugging in a
controller card? Or will I need to pay some additional "[unix option]
tax"? I really have no idea. But it's not as meaningful since that's not
the direction things went.

Before the "interactive tax", AS/400s were more or less all priced
similarly. There wasn't as much distinction between the 'server' systems
that had zero/minimum interactive and the systems that sold with a lot
of interactive capability. When the big price difference came about, it
wasn't exactly by IBM suddenly charging _more_ for the interactive
systems and leaving the price point for 'servers' where it was. It came
mostly by IBM drastically _reducing_ the price point of 'server'
systems. (IIRC)

So, it wasn't by adding a "tax"; it was by slashing off a big discount.
Those that didn't need it didn't have to pay for it. Is that concept
different for unix vendors?

Tom Liotta

--
Tom Liotta
The PowerTech Group, Inc.
19426 68th Avenue South
Kent, WA 98032
Phone  253-872-7788 x313
Fax    253-872-7904
http://www.powertech.com


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