IBM under fire over SAP costs

IBM is wrong when it says that users can run SAP as cheaply on a mainframe as on a Unix system, says the GartnerGroup.

Speaking at the Gartner Symposium in Cannes last week, analyst Andy Butler said: ?IBM will tell you it is cheaper to run SAP on a mainframe, but it?s not.?

Butler used a model which revealed it was twice as expensive to run a SAP configuration on a mainframe as it was on a Unix system.

The mainframe hardware is not the main factor in the higher cost, Butler said. Most of the difference was in software costs.

Butler also criticised vendors for releasing misleading information about SAP benchmark tests. Users should factor down benchmark claims by between a half and two-thirds to get a more realistic figure of what a platform was capable of.

?Sun Microsystems now claims to have run 14,500 concurrent SAP users on its Unix systems but that is just not realistic,? he said.

He warned Hewlett-Packard server users to choose carefully which reseller they buy their HP server support from.

?Remember the third class passengers were locked in on the Titanic while the first and second class passengers went to the lifeboats. Don?t be on the third class list,? he said.

? Report by Colin Barker.