Bolstering IBM Corp’s recently-adopted usage-based S/390 software pricing plan, BMC Software Corp is offering a new three-year lease program for customers whose use of DB2 or IMS is less than 25%. Meta Group analysts say the pricing won’t be attractive for most users because the two-year cost equals product repurchase, and most users can better improve pricing via hardware containment (separate or serialized CPUs) or replacement, while high-growth users will achieve better rates via enterprise licenses. Nevertheless, it thinks it’s a foot in the door for negotiating informal usage pricing with BMC even if more competitive S/390 system software ISV pricing isn’t going to be evident for another two or three years.
