How do you price your hitherto expensive software for IBM’s 9370s, which are intended to be mass market boxes, even more so than the early 4300s? The emphatic answer from Applied Data Research Inc is that you set bargain-basement prices. The Princeton, New Jersey IBM software products subsidiary of Ameritech Inc says that its Datacom/DB relational database, DataDictionary, DataQuery interactive query system, ADR/eMail electronic mail system, Librarian, Vollie on-line programming system, Look performance measurement system, and Ideal applications generator are all now available under VM for the 9373/20 and 9375/40 at just 15% of the price, and on the 9375/60 and 9377/90 at 35% of the price, for the same products under VM on the 3090, 308X and 4300 machines. The same pricing ratio also applies for the MVS and DOS/VSE versions of the ADR products when run on the 9370s.ADR’s move in drastically reducing its prices for its software when to be run on the 9370s mirrors the tiered pricing strategy that was announced by IBM when it launched the small machines last October, and introduced a four-tier pricing structure, which like that of ADR, confusingly has a break point between the two 9375 models, 40 and 60.
