Some Tweaks On Deals And Flex System Price Changes

September 16, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is the fall, and IBM is trying to wrap up its third quarter in two weeks. So don’t expect a lot of wheeling and dealing through formal announcements. Depending on how the third quarter goes, IBM could keep the dealing more informal, but if it has specific goals and wants to rein in both its salespeople and resellers from getting too carried away, it will do some formal deals in the fourth quarter. In the meantime, you need to be aware of some tweaks to existing deals and price changes on Flex System iron.

First up, in announcement letter 313-083, IBM has tweaked the Power Systems Trade-In program, which was last updated in March, to remove Power7-based Power 750 machines from the list of new iron you can buy to get the trade-in to one of the machines you can replace and get a trade-in if you buy a Power7+ machine. Other Power7+ machines, including the PS7XX blade servers and the entire line of Power Systems except the Power 750 can be acquired and still get the trade-in credit, so I would have to surmise that IBM just doesn’t have a lot of Power 750s in the barn or out in the sales channel and that is what this is really all about.

IBM has in announcement letter 313-085 changed some of the paperwork terms for its no-charge removal efforts for vintage AS/400, iSeries, RS/6000, and pSeries. IBM is letting the paperwork run out for three months instead of one, and you now have nine months to return the machine instead of six if you buy a new box. You have to get a new Power Systems box to get IBM to cart the old box away for free.

Starting January 1, 2014, IBM is also raising prices on selected software by 3 percent. You can see the list of programs in announcement letter 313-075. On the Power Systems front, RPG, COBOL, C/C++ compilers for IBM i platforms are affected by the price increase. Compilers for AIX and Linux are also seeing a price increase of three points on Power iron, if you run a mixed environment. A slew of storage management software from the Tivoli division is also getting a price increase, so take a gander of the list if you are shopping. And finally, a bunch of WebSphere middleware, mostly for the System z platform running z/OS, is getting a 3 percent price increase.

IBM is actually increasing some prices on memory and disks for its Flex System nodes, as shown below: