IBM Cognos purchases are governed by the IBM Passport Advantage terms.  IBM recently announced IBM Passport Advantage Agreement changes which are designed principally to support the expanding offerings available under the program.  Changes automatically become effective on July 18, 2011, unless you notify IBM in writing prior to that date, that you disagree with the change.

You can find a copy of the agreement at :

IBM PASSPORT ADVANTAGE AGREEMENT INFO

Please carefully review the information for changes and enhancements being made.  I wanted to bring to your attention a few that will affect my IBM Cognos clients.

• Virtualization Licensing (also called “Subcapacity Licensing”). Terms related to Virtualization Licensing that have been separately available for many years, and that have been included with all new enrollments since 2005, have now been incorporated into the Agreement, making this rapidly-expanding technology solution available to all customers without separate action being required.

(Note: Subcapacity Licensing  is beneficial if you are investing in IBM Cognos PVU licensing and want to purchase beefier hardware to accommodate growth but don’t want to buy the extra PVU licenses. )

•Renewal of Software Subscription and Support. To protect customers from accidentally becoming noncompliant with the terms of the Agreement, it will now be required that for each Passport Advantage Site, the renewal of Software Subscription and Support for a particular product must either be for all licenses currently in service, or for none at all.

(Note:  The language states “licenses currently in service”, I believe this means if you have licenses not being utilized you can terminate those, but we have not received confirmation of that from IBM yet. )

In addition to the major enhancements, the IBM Passport Advantage Agreement has been generally reorganized and sections related to compliance, taxes, data privacy and security have been updated to make it easier to read and to better align with other IBM Agreements that you may have in place.

For more information, please visit the IBM Web site at http://www.ibm.com/software/passportadvantage or contact Lodestar Solutions at  813-415-2910.