What I’ve been doing👨💻
It still surprises me when I see organisations paying IBM S&S for products they no longer have deployed or in some cases never used. This is such a waste of money and easy to uncover. Take the list of PVU/RVU products from passport advantage and compare to ILMT. If it’s not showing in ILMT you have a potential saving to investigate. Do this once a year, a few months before your S&S renewal and you have more to spend on products you actually use.
📢News and IBM Announcements
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IBM announced their Q2 Earnings last month. It was hard to find any decent commentary on it but this “key takeaways” article from The Stack is worth a skim.
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Kyndryls CEO Martin Schroeter had an interesting interview . What jumped out for me was the focus on partnerships and the emphasised on independence (mentioned at least 7 times). It will be interesting to see what happens from a licensing perspective in the next few years when Kyndryl will have to pay market rates for IBM products in their managed services.
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If the announcement of power systems increases is anything to go by (~15%) we are in for a significant increase in distributed license costs. Post in the IT Jungle Inflation Finally Comes To IBM i Platform Prices covers this well.
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Changes to technologies eligible for sub-capacity licensing is an important announcement to watch. It tells you what is no longer supported. This is a common license audit finding so review it and check your platforms are not out of date
What I’ve been reading, listening or watching🌐
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There was an interesting discussion on LinkedIn on how IBM communicate license policy changes. IBM made the policy changes in May but officially announced the changes in July.
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With ServiceNow showing up more as an enterprise SAM I thought I better check out it’s maturity in the latest ServiceNow release (Rome). Still dependant on ILMT but the reconciliation functionality is one to watch, especially if you are implementing service mapping in ServiceNow also.
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I’ve been reviewing the pat articles of fellow licensing expert Eric Chiu over at the ITAM Review. Figured out the filters to list all IBM licensing related articles in ITAM Review website in one page. Worth a read.
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A post from Origina on Enterprise Software Renewal Negotiations had a few useful tips in it. There are other good articles related to IBM licensing in their blog but you will have to sift through posts.
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An old article but still relevant and a great explanation on IBM Raises Price on Software Support; Shoves Customers Toward the Cloud.
I encourage you to use the hashtag #ibmlicensing when you find a post this audience might be interested in.
Writing 📝
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Got a couple of interesting questions in this month (UVU and developer licensing) which I’ll have answers for very soon.
Is there anything you’d like to hear about from the world of IBM licensing? Leave a comment or email me at questions@ibmlicensingexpert.com
Events / Webinars 🎬📅
A little lean this month but here’s a few webinars I found interesting:
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Video from the team at Integration.Works called IBM Licensing – What do you need to know? Worth a watch
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Explanation video of IBM Turbonomic + Flexera One ITAM . If you have either Flexera or Turbonomic you should watch. It highlights an interesting licensing problem. If you are moving workloads around you virtual environment to maximise performance are you inadvertently creating compliance risks?
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While searching for webinars on IBM license audits I found one of my old webinar recording. 10 Tips to getting a better results in an IBM audit Webinar IBM License Audit Tips. Still relevant🙂
IBM Licensing Tips
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Got an IBM license audit question? Start by reading the official IBM License FAQ.
You want more?
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🧑🤝🧑The IBM Licensing Group on LinkedIn where you can connect with others interested in IBM licensing.
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📚 My blog at https://www.ibmlicensingexpert.com for past articles and subscribe to my IBM license tips.
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🎦 Watch IBM Licensing Expert on YouTube.
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📅 Archive of past newsletters
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