From January 1, 2025, IBM‘s annual global price harmonization takes effect, with most price increases reaching up to 7%.
Price Changes
- IBM Software: 6% increase globally across the portfolio.
- IBM Power: 6% increase across High-end/Mid-Range offerings, excluding highly elastic scale-out offerings.
- IBM Storage: 6% increase across Flash/Mid-Range Tape/ESS, excluding DS8K/Tape increases, SAN + Ready Nodes, LTO Tape & Media.
- Technology Lifecycle Services: 4% to 6% increase across Non-Expert Care offerings.
- IBM Cloud: 2% to 7% increase across select offerings in IAAS/PAAS, excluding VMware:
- IaaS services in MZRs will remain unchanged.
- IaaS services in Single Zone Regions (SZRs) will see a 5-6% increase. These increases will not apply to existing VMware, PowerVS, High Performance Computing (HPC), or SAP deployments.
- Most PaaS services will adopt the regional price uplifts that IaaS already employs, raising prices for some, but not all, PaaS services outside of the United States. These increases do not include Kubernetes Service, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, Cloud Logs, Cloud Monitoring, IBM Cloud Activity Tracker, IBM Cloud Log Analysis, Messages for RabbitMQ, and IBM Cloud Databases.
- Cloud Object Storage introduces charges for high-speed uploads per GB depending on location and increases the pricing for high-speed downloads.
- R1Soft backup software services will experience a 10%-33% price increase, matching vendor price increases.
- IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center Workload Protection pricing for Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) will increase per compute instance per month by 118% to match industry standards.
- Key Protect will eliminate the free tier and introduce charges for cross-regional resiliency.
Implications for IBM customers
These pricing adjustments take effect on January 1, 2025. This means that new contracts and renewals on and after that date use the new pricing. Current fixed-price contracts remain unaffected, and these increased prices will apply once the client’s fixed-price contract ends. Any renewals, which should be at a fixed discount, not a fixed price, using a Cloud Enterprise Savings Plan (ESP) contract, will be based on the new prices. This means that for renewals, you will receive the discount on the updated price, and will not receive the original discounted price.
FAQ
Why this price harmonization?
IBM changes its pricing once per year to account for inflation, market standards and other macro-economic indicators, which helps ensure stability and consistency over time.
When was this communicated?
This change was communicated in an announcement letter via the Cloud portal on September 3, 2024. Clients who have subscribed to notifications received the announcement via email.
Is my organization impacted?
This action will impact most IBM Clients worldwide, although that impact will vary from client to client depending on which services they are using and where those services are running.
What to do now?
If you are in need of new licenses, we recommend purchasing before the price increase on January 1, 2025. You have until then to receive the old, lower pricing.
What about clients with fixed-price contracts?
IBM will honor its contractual obligations and clients that have contracts that fix any pricing will not be impacted by this change.
Does this increase apply to internal as well as external accounts?
Yes, these increases will apply to both internal (IBM) and external clients.
Will IBM Cloud’s prices still be competitive?
Yes. Much analysis was done as part of the planning for this increase. IBM is very much competitive on price, with pricing still being superior to most competitors.
Are any further price changes to be expected in 2025?
Although not completely ruled out, this price harmonization is the only one planned on an IBM Cloud-wide basis for 2025. This is in alignment with a new IBM-wide policy of only making one broad price increase for customers per year in January. Price changes beyond this will only be made in exceptional circumstances.
More information
To learn more about IBM, please visit: https://www.schneider.im/software/IBM.
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