April 03, 2001, 10:18 AM — IBM's rollout of its z/OS mainframe software last week provides a crucial foundation for building the kind of usage-based license models businesses have been demanding for a long time, users and analysts said.
The company introduced z/OS last fall along with its z900 line of mainframe hardware. Z/OS is IBM's first 64-bit mainframe operating system and includes new capabilities designed to make it easier and less expensive to run mainframes.
The most significant of these, from a user perspective, is z/OS's support of license manager technology for monitoring and measuring mainframe software usage. IBM is expected to ship the license manager in the fall. The company will then be able to charge users for software based on actual use, in much the same way utility companies charge their customers.
Users have long said that this kind of a model is far more equitable than current capacity-based licenses that are based on system size, where the larger a system is, the more users pay for the software, regardless of actual use.
