TCO is one of these financial acronyms that geeks hate and CIO loves! It stands for Total Cost of Ownership. It's the sum of all costs associated to the acquisition, training and maintenance of a product. See why & how Informix competes efficiently with other products.

Let's assume, that the price of training and installation is the same, although, many examples shows that when the license is "free", service companies tend to charge more on installation.

We don't want to annoy you with complex math, but let's just look at basic figures...

How we calculated that? The CPU license for IDS Express is $5025, maintenance for the first year is included in the price, we added 20% for year 2 & year 3. That gives us a cost for 3 years. We divided the cost by 3 to get the price for one year. We did the same calculation for MySQL, using their "Gold" support package. Rate bused 1 € = $1.3.

Okay, they are various editions of IDS, you'll find a nice comparison chart on IBM's site [1], so it might be a little different for your needs, on the other hands, a small shop with 3 users costs $1029, with support & maintenance, it brings the bill to $480 per year.

And to paraphrase Ambuj Goyal , take back control of your bottom line!

This article was:

• written by Jean Georges Perrin (jgp at iiug dot org), IIUG Board of Directors,
• with the help of Cindy Lichtenauer (cindy at iiug dot org)
• and Ron Flannery (rflannery at one-point dot com), author of the Informix Handbook, owner of One Point Solutions (see: http://www.one-point.com/) .

More resources:

• [1] Visit: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/informix/ids/ids-ed-choice/.

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