What is New around IBM Software Licensing?

Market Changes

There seems to be a growing trend by software publishers to support Dual use or hybrid licenses. These licenses allow the end user to use them either on-premise or in the Cloud.

An example of Dual-use license is for IBM® Notes™ (formerly Lotus Notes). Which is a single offering that grants entitlement to both on-premises and cloud deployments, allowing the customer to choose which workloads and user bases to service in each environment. See brochure at https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=LOB14123USEN.

Many IBM Software products are available for monthly licensing such as WebSphere Application Server starting at $166 per month, per core. Clients can freely move monthly licenses between on-premises and public and private clouds as needed including on IBM Soft Layer and third-party clouds.

While the dual use part number for IBM Notes or for WebSphere is not new, it seems IBM is continuing to add more dual-use licenses every month.

This is the same direction used by other Publishers such as Microsoft.

In addition to Dual use, software publishers are encouraging customers to move to software subscriptions where there is a single monthly payment for both license use and support.

Changing Part Numbers and Changing Metrics

It seems that most customers are frustrated by changing product names and metrics.The list of name changes and changing metrics within the IBM software family would fill a book.At times the confusion seems to get out of hand. Take for example IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM). That product was once PVU based but then changed to RVU (see Software Announcement 211-015, dated April 12, 2011). Later IBM announced Smart Cloud APM Entry. Which was ITM licensed by the virtual Server. Later called Cloud APM basic, which is back to a PVU based metric. While all three products basically provide the same function, one needs to be careful of the changing metrics. And if multiple license types are owned by the same customer, determining how to count the deployment can change the licenses required.

ILMT Updates

IBM’s license metric tool (ILMT) is now up to version 9.2.12. The tool continues to provide functionality that makes life (at least one’s tracking software life) a little easier.