How Cloud Paks can help with the shelfware challenge
Cloud Paks can be licensed with a new metric called VPC (Virtual Processor Core) which is more flexible than the old PVU (Processor Value Unit). VPC allows customers to pay for a fraction of the cores when software is deployed in a containerized environment rather than for all the virtual cores made available to the IBM product installed on a standard virtual machine.
Use case
A well-known financial institute had Business Automation Workflow and FileNet in their environment. FileNet was being used as a supporting program within the Business Automation workflow and so was free of charge. The customer had plans to discontinue Business Automation workflow in two years as part of their IT strategy, but wanted to continue using FileNet. The challenge for the customer was that they had no licenses available for FileNet and had to incur additional cost to buy FileNet licenses if Business Automation was discontinued. Additionally, the Business Automation Workflow licenses were perpetual licenses which would have become shelfware licenses once the product was discontinued.
The introduction of Cloud Paks allowed a license upgrade from Business Automation Workflow to Cloud Pak for Automation. The Cloud Pak for Automation is a suite of IBM products which includes both FileNet and Business Automation Workflow. Using Cloud Pak for Automation allowed license flexibility for using FileNet content manager. As a result, the customer did not have to purchase additional licenses for FileNet, but instead use their existing licenses to upgrade to what the business needed and at the same time save the Business Automation Workflow licenses from becoming shelfware.
Lastly, Cloud Paks offer the possibility to purchase software through subscriptions which, depending on the customer’s roadmap, can be more convenient and cost-effective to avoid the increase of TCO.
Benefits of Cloud Paks
Access to Value-Added Offerings in each Cloud Pak
If a company is planning to migrate IBM workloads to the cloud or modernize them through container technologies, Cloud Paks may be the right choice to optimize the current IBM contract and leverage RedHat Openshift and RHEL stack which are included in the offering.
Flexibility
The flexible licensing option within Cloud Paks provides the ability to mix and match capabilities and products upon demand. Clients deploy what they need, when they need it without engaging every time with IBM sales for a commercial trade-up or additional purchases. For instance, if the client owns Cloud Pak for Integration, they can easily upgrade from MQ to MQ Advanced without an additional transaction, because both products are included in the Cloud Pak.
Virtual Processor Core (VPC) Metric
- The VPC metric aligns with the “virtual core” pricing model for many public cloud providers, making it easier to size because they are calculated on the fraction of cores used.
- Clients running 100 or 120 PVU per-core hardware may free up significant excess capacity – 43% and 71% respectively – by converting to VPCs through the Committed Term License upgrade.
Other Benefits
- Upgrades from Subscription and Support (S&S) protect client investments – and lock in pricing for the term.
- Aligns to subscription and cloud-centric pricing models.
- More favorable discounts for Cloud Paks compared to the standard IBM licenses.
Clients prefer Committed Term Licenses when compared to perpetual licenses as it offers a lower investment - when compared to a perpetual license model.