With Subscription Price, IBM i P20 And P30 Tiers Get Bigger Bundles - IT Jungle

July 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue has been noodling how it might tweak the subscription pricing for the P20 and P30 tiers since getting feedback on the first pass it did on its big iron Power Systems machines way back in February 2023. That feedback from the company’s biggest IBM i customers was not entirely glowing, but IBM has been clear that it would in the fullness of time move from perpetual software licensing to subscription pricing on all of its software, and that IBM i would not be an exception.

To cushion the blow – and there is one because customers keep machines in the field for five, six, seven, or even more years and only have to buy an operating system when they get a new machine and Software Maintenance (SWMA in the IBM lingo) pricing was not so bad. A subscription price, by necessity given the way companies behave, was almost always going to be a lot more expensive than a perpetual license plus SWMA over the term that companies actually deploy machines.

To which we say now, and which we have said for many years now: So what? The entire IT world is switching to subscription pricing because companies want annuity-like revenue streams. IBM is tired of the large chunk of the OS/400 and now IBM i base that does not pay for Software Maintenance and therefore makes the licensing costs and maintenance costs higher for those who do. Pay per use like cable or phone service seems just as fair as buying a piece of software like a capital good such as a truck or a dishwasher. If the incremental money IBM gets over a seven year period is higher – our math back in February 2023 showed it cost 22.2 percent more for a P05 license, 39.1 percent for a P10 license, and in that same range for a P20 and P30 license depending on how IBM might allocate the 5250 Enterprise Enablement feature on a license – and IBM invests that in keeping Power Systems alive for another generation or two, consider it a good bargain.

This is the nature of a niche business like the System z mainframe and its z/OS, z/VSE, and Linux operating systems or the Power Systems platform and its IBM i, AIX, and Linux operating systems. They have a significant base of customers, to be sure, but development cycles cost billions of dollars and that money has to come from somewhere.

The mainframe has always had monthly and annual rental fees, and that is how most customers consume its systems software. With Power Systems, IBM could switch to subscription prices that are somewhat more expensive with lots of value-added features and get the money that way across a wide base of customers, or Big Blue could make perpetual license and SWMA fees crazy high for a smaller buy arguably more loyal base of customers.

Basically, with subscription pricing, customers who have been lowering their costs by stretching out the time they have machines in the field, whether they are a large IBM i shop or a tiny one, to get more loyal and more regular in the way they pay for the software that they consume each day.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the new deal for subscription pricing for the P20 and P30 tiers. (The P40 tier was retired long ago, and the P50 tier on some older big iron machines in the Power5, Power6, and Power7 generations has the same pricing as the P30 tier.) The P20 subscription deal is outlined in announcement letter AD25-1230 and the P30 subscription is outlined in announcement letter AD25-1098.

The P20 subscription pricing will be available on July 15 and is known as the IBM i P20 Standard Edition, and it will be available on Power10 and Power11 machinery and for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.5. The subscriptions will be available in terms with one, two, three, four, or five years. If you have P20 perpetual licenses – which IBM has been calling “non-expiring licenses” in recent years for reasons we still cannot understand – you can convert them to the P20 Standard Edition subscriptions provided that you have your perpetual license under a SWMA contract. The conversion subscriptions are sold in terms of three, four, or five years. The initial P20 Standard Edition will be available on the Power S1024 based on the Power10 processor as well as the new Power S1125 and Power L1124 based on the just-announced Power11 processor.

Here is what is included in the P20 Standard Edition bundle:

As you can see, the P20 bundle now includes a whole bunch of things that used to be separately priced. This includes Backup, Recovery, and Media Services for i (BRMS), which is a used to save and restore data on IBM i platforms. PowerHA System Mirror for i is also included in the bundle, as is IBM’s Migrate While Active Tool, which is used to migrate active logical partitions from one machine to another or to IBM’s PowerVS cloud. The PowerSC endpoint security tool for AIX and IBM i is also added to the P20 Standard Edition bundle, as is the PowerHA Tools for IBM i including iASP Manager, Full System FlashCopy (FSFC) Manager, Full System Replication (FSR) Manager, Smart Assist for PowerHA on IBM i, and Safeguarded Copy Toolkit. The final new piece of the P20 Standard Edition includes the iDoctor Toolkit, which is a performance monitoring and management tool that many customers use and that interfaces to IBM Technology Expert Labs and the techies that run that troubleshooting service.

The P20 Standard Edition bundle obviously includes the base IBM i operating system and the integrated relational database management system that has always been part of the OS/400 and IBM i platform. The bundle does not include Db2 Mirror database mirroring software or the Rational Developer Studio development tools.

Here is how the pricing of the new P20 Standard Edition subscription compares to perpetual licenses plus software maintenance for the P20 tier:

Let’s walk through this chart. First, back in February 2023, before all of the price hikes that IBM has done over the past year, a perpetual license in the P20 tier cost $44,000 per core and SWMA was $9,000 per core per year. As we go to press, the P20 perpetual license is $49,438 per core and SWMA is $8,954 per core per year. IBM said perpetual licenses would get more expensive to encourage companies to move to subscriptions, and there you have it.

Not only that, but the P20 subscription price implemented two years ago was $16,550 per core per year, and with the price increases IBM did in the past year, it rose to $18,800 per core per year. Now, the IBM i-only subscription price is still in effect, and for the P20 tier, that is now lowered to $14,500 per core per year. With the P20 Standard Edition with all of the goodies thrown in, the cost if $16,000 per core per year, with IBM estimating the value of the bundle at more than $19,000 per core per year.

And if you want to convert a P20 perpetual license to a P20 Standard Edition bundle subscription, you have to pay $13,000 per core.

With the P30 machines, the new subscription is called the P30 Enterprise Edition and it includes a whole bunch of other stuff bundled in, including Rational Development Studio for i, which has all of the compilers, and the IBM i Extensions for VS Code, the latter of course being the hot new IDE tool for the IBM i platform. For the development tools, IBM is including a license for five users for each IBM i core activated, which it says is a ratio that will mean most P30 shops do not have to buy additional development tool user subscriptions. (The price of the development tools sold individually was not available at press time.)

The P30 Enterprise Edition includes Db2 Mirror for i database clustering as well as a license to Red Hat Ansible Automation. For the Ansible tool, you get one year of support for 100 managed nodes (which are basically logical partitions or whole bare metal machines) for one year if you active IBM i on at least 10 cores with the P30 Enterprise Edition.

Let’s walk through the pricing on the P30 Enterprise Edition subscription bundle:

Before all of the price changes in the past year, a P30 perpetual license to IBM i cost $59,000 per core and SWMA cost $11,000 per core per year, as we used in our analysis back in February 2023 when the first pass at P20 and P30 subscription pricing was announced. But as you can see in the chart above, a P30 perpetual license now costs $66,292 per core and SWMA in the P30 tier costs $13,310 per core per year. Back in February 2023, a P30 subscription to just IBM i itself cost $23,000 per core, but after the price increases between then and now, that P30 subscription price rose to $26,000 per core per year. This price is still in effect if all you want to do is buy IBM i subscriptions. But that would be silly, so don’t do that.

With the announcement of the P30 Enterprise Edition subscription, you get all of the goodies in the bundle for $24,500 per core per year, and the price of the underlying bare-bones IBM i subscription for the P30 tier drops down to $21,900 per core per year. The value of that bundle, says IBM, is more than $52,000 per core per year.

Next week, we will cover all of the rules about subscriptions for Power10 and Power11 machines and update our comparisons between perpetual licenses and subscriptions for the P05, P10, P20, and P30 tiers.

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