News

Overall revenue was $15.8 billion, a 2% increase. The “Software” division rose 7.1% to $6.7 billion and, within that, Red Hat increased 7% while “Data & AI” decreased by 3%.

Given the current clamouring for AI products and services, it is surprising that IBM – the home of Deep Blue and Watson – have seen their revenue drop in this area.

Other than Red Hat, the other bright spot– perhaps surprisingly – was IBM Z which increased 6%. That’s a much faster rate that the “Infrastructure” division to which it belongs, which grew just 0.7%.

See the full results here.

Full Capacity licensing changes

IBM have updated the language around Full Capacity licensing in the International Passport Advantage Agreement (IPAA). Previously it stated that you could:

“license the total number of physical processor cores activated and available for use on all servers where the Eligible Product [EP], if applicable, is deployed (Full Capacity).”

But now Clause 9.2 states:

“Client must license the total number of all physical Activated Processor Cores in the physical hardware environment made available to or managed by the EP, except for those servers from which the EP has been permanently removed (Full Capacity).

An Activated Processor Core is a processor core that is available for use in a physical server, regardless of whether the capacity of the processor core can be or is limited through virtualization technologies, operating system commands, BIOS settings, or similar restrictions.”

This appears to mean that all physical cores must be licensed, whether the IBM Eligible Product can access them or not.

What does this mean?

We would urge customers who are licensing some/all of their servers at Full Capacity to ensure that they don’t need to change the logic they applied to the core count due to this change.

This could also be critical for organisations that have proven to IBM, in a previous audit, that their physical servers limit the core access to LPARs or via clusters. IBM could be looking to re-audit with these amendments. Customers need to ensure that they remain compliant with these new terms now that they will need to count all processors cores on these large physical machines.

While these changes won’t apply until your next renewal, ensure you look for this logic being applied to any audit results in the meantime.

You can review the latest terms here.

Windows Server EoL

A reminder that the end of Q3 2024 see Microsoft Windows Server 2012/R2 removed from the IBM sub capacity eligible technology list. This means any IBM software running on servers using this Operating System will no longer be deemed eligible for Sub Capacity licensing from IBM, leading to potential large cost increases.

If you can’t upgrade the server(s) in question within the timeframe, or migrate the workloads to a more modern server, it is possible to request a grace period from IBM through sharing your migration plan and timescales.

You can see the full list of products being removed here which also includes SUSE, Red Hat, and AIX.