What do you mean, My Cognos licenses expired?

For those of you who have been taking advantage of price savings by moving your IBM licenses to an IBM Passport Advantage Agreement (PA#), you may run into this situation.  IBM has changed the way they have been emailing notices for your licenses that are due to expire.  Instead of sending the email 75 days prior to the expiration of the license, they are sending out the email 75 days prior to your PA# Anniversary Date.  This could result in IBM licenses that are expiring prior to the Anniversary Date being left in the lurch.  I have not seen IBM put a client in the position they have to have the expired license reinstated and pay a penalty.  However, it could put you in a precarious position when you attempt to log a support ticket by finding out your license is flagged as expired.  During a time when you need their support, the last thing you need is to jump through hoops to get IBM to manually authorize an extension for support.  As we all know, this will only happen at the most inconvenient time possible and will only add more stress to the problem that is requiring you to log a support ticket.

In essence, keep track of IBM licenses that expire mid-term and follow up with your Business Partner to see if you might run into this situation.

As an additional reminder, make sure that your Primary and Secondary contacts authorized with IBM are current.  Only the Primary is allow to download software and updates, authorize the Secondary to be able to log support requests and will be the only one to receive notice of license expirations.  Many clients forget when an employee is moving to a different position or is leaving the company to have this updated before that occurs.