What Is SCRTPro?
SCRTPro is a new service from industry icon Cheryl Watson that provides IBM Software Cost Management as a Service (SCMaaS) for IBM z/OS installations. Each month, our pricing specialists review your SCRT report before you send it to IBM and provide reports, spreadsheets, and graphs that provide you with a single source of all the information you need to manage your z/OS software inventory. The deliverables include a preview of the costs for the month, a comparison to year-to-date and prior year amounts, warnings about items that should be excluded from the SCRT report, recommendations on how to reduce costs in the future, an analysis of MSU usage and rolling 4-hour averages, warnings of IPLA (one-time-charge) products that are nearing their entitlements, and any concerns about contract compliance.
Business Challenge
Mainframe MLC (monthly license charge) products often constitute the largest part of the IT budget, with monthly amounts ranging from a few hundred thousand to millions of dollars. IBM provides over twenty different pricing options for use with z/OS products. Yet very few companies can afford to have a full time mainframe software pricing specialist who knows how to exploit those options to manage, contain, and reduce your costs. We provide that expertise and useful executive-level reports and technical analysis of your bills. Did you know that IBM invoices can contain errors, usually minor, but that those errors are seldom noticed? It’s our job to notice!
Our Solution
We provide easy-to-use reports and tools that show the cost of your software and provide “what if” answers. Although there are a few other products that can show the cost of your software, they don’t provide the expertise to show you how to exploit hardware and software technologies and IBM pricing options to minimize your costs. We study this full-time and there are still things we learn every month. Our approach is to provide not only reports, but continual advice along with that information. And that advice will change as IBM provides even more options.
Key Benefits
Our SCRTPro service offering provides you the following benefits:
- Get back in control of your software bills and contracts
- Access to a team of Software Pricing specialists
- Benefit from pooled experiences of other customers
- View your estimated bill before sending your SCRT data to IBM
- Identify exception situations before submitting your SCRT
- No software to install
- Get independent unbiased expert advice on reducing costs
- Understand impact on software costs before adding or removing capacity or workloads
- Identify the R4HA for any combination of LPARs or products, even YTD
- If an ELA is in place, show YTD amount of accrual
- Determine impact on software cost when changing processors
- Identify if an IPLA product is approaching its entitlement
- Get answers to “what is the cost” questions, such as “What is the cost if the DB2 workload increases by 10%?” or “What are the savings if we remove LPAR ABC?”, or “How would our software bill change if we added a zIIP?”
Service Offering Details
SCRTPro is an annual service from Watson & Walker that provides a prediction of software costs before you submit your SCRT report to IBM, analysis of each SCRT report and R4HA using a 25-point checklist, suggestions on pricing options, YTD analysis of capacity and costs, and a monthly WebEx with one of our analysts to go over all the reports to discuss what happened each month.
In addition to the annual service, we also provide consulting on ELAs (Enterprise License Agreements), installing new processors, moving to country-wide multiplex pricing (which is NOT a simple project, and often done poorly), outsourcing issues, contract reviews, and audit readiness reviews. Below are some of the typical charts that are provided each month.
