IBM's latest contract licensing vehicle, Flexpoints, offers IBM customers flexibility, choice and value, but managing the agreement can seem a daunting task, with traditional, reactive license management tools not being able to give the proactive control needed to govern such an agreement.

 

Astute are extremely proud to be the only offer currently on the market to help organizations govern, control and get the best value from IBM flexpoints contract, either as a Managed Service or with technology for you to manage the contract yourself.

 

Flexpoints are purchased from IBM in product families, each license grants the company access to a range of products. The total amount of licenses purchased are calculated into a total Flexpoint license count, which can be distributed across the products in the family, with each product having a flexpoint price per license. For example MQ Advanced, from the "IBM Cloud Integration - Perpetual" family, is 191 flexpoints per PVU.

 

Managing a Flexpoint contract however can seem a difficult task, given the governance an controls needed to ensure licenses are created with the flexpoints before usage, utilization is monitored for rise and falls, whilst new demand is approved, consolidated and validated. Without governance like this, many customers will not get the value they hope to from these agreements and face either underutilization at the next renewal, or over usage resulting in a large compliance problem, as flexibility does not equal unlimited.