IBM will ship the latest version of its WebSphere application
server for the operating system z/OS and introduce a new pricing
model for the product next week.
The earlier version of WebSphere for z/OS had been priced at a
fixed $35,000 (£22,000) per processor. The new edition will adopt
the value-unit pricing model that is familiar to IBM's mainframe
customers, said David Chew, director of WebSphere enterprise
transaction systems.
"We changed for the zSeries because these processors tend to be
rather big and powerful, and customers are used to a pricing model
that is more akin with their hardware structure," he said.
Value units are calculated based on the processing performance
of the zSeries hardware. The capacity of the mainframe is measured
in millions of service units.
Customers purchase licences based on the number of processors
they actually use, but those with older zSeries models pay less per
processor, since their machines perform at lower levels than the
newer models.
WebSphere has a tool that is designed to help customers
determine how many value units they need, based on their
hardware.
Marcy Nechemias, IBM's marketing manager of WebSphere for z/OS,
said existing users of WebSphere for z/OS will see no change in
cost. Their inventory will simply show the correct number of value
units instead of "engines" or processors.
"It is just a conversion from one metric to another," said
Nechemias.
Customers that buy WebSphere for z/OS for fewer than three
engines and notice that the old per-processor pricing model might
have worked out cheaper will be able to get started at a lower
cost, she added.
IBM is trying to ensure that customers will see a lower cost for
incremental growth once they start using WebSphere for z/OS. "We
want to see WebSphere become a pervasive product on the mainframe
platform," Nechemias said.
WebSphere 5.0 is certified for Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
1.3 technologies and also supports more than half the J2EE 1.4
technologies that are due to be finalised later this year,
according to IBM.
Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk, said that IBM has worked
hard to reduce the differences between versions of WebSphere and
that the job of porting applications from smaller boxes to the
mainframe should be easier with WebSphere 5.0.