Your IBM mainframe is central to your business operations, and its associated costs are probably amongst the largest expense items in
your IT budget. You know that the mainframe is likely to be less expensive to run than some of your other “distributed” platforms but
because mainframe costs can be readily consolidated they are subject to greater scrutiny. You have to demonstrate that you’re getting
the best possible value from your mainframe.
Evaluate your Mainframe Usage …
IBM often changes and introduces new licensing options for the
mainframe environment in order to improve the platforms overall
value proposition. However, without a detailed assessment of
how those changes can be leveraged for your use cases, its
difficult to work out whether, and how, to implement them.
Examples of changes to licensing options include:
-
Monthly/perpetual license swap. IBM’s widely used
mainframe middleware products (CICS, IMS, DB2) tend to
be licensed on a monthly subscription basis, but they are
also available to purchase on a perpetual license. Flipping
these licences can help reduce OpEx expenditure.
-
Reduced charges for Development activities. IBM offers
reduced pricing for Development and Test activities on
mainframes, ensuring proper assignment of Test and Dev
environments can reduce usage charges.
-
Right size future maintenance. If you are licensing
mainframe software under perpetual terms (a base license
with annual maintenance and support) you should work to
forecast future requirements as its possible to part maintain
providing you agree specific volumes up front with IBM.
-
Hardware related savings. New hardware is often more
efficient and mainframe workload specific processors like
ZIIPs, ZAAPs, and IFLs can further reduce usage charges
…to identify and achieve untapped cost savings.
Our services can be tailored to your exact requirements,
encompassing one or more areas of investigation. In all cases
our over arching aim will be to save you money and make best
use of your existing assets by comprehensively reviewing usage
and licensing.
What we can do:
-
Prepare an ‘Effective License Position’, finding areas of
overspend for immediate spend reduction, and then looking
deeper at how you could change operations to optimise and
reduce spend further.
-
Reduce the risk of being non-compliant (and the associated
risk of unplanned costs), by detailing any occurrences of
under spend, and explaining how to resolve.
-
Enhance your understanding of the different IBM license
options based on usage.
-
Inform strategic initiatives such as mainframe platform
transformation, by improving software delivery and testing
through better integration with existing DevOps activities,
and even looking at options for migrating workload off the
mainframe.
-
Facilitate the negotiation of a more favourable contract by
using the enhanced understanding of your software use
provided by our suite of services.
