Participating cloud services and discounts

The BYOL to SaaS program provides a deep discount to the participating cloud services and charge metrics. Note that cloud services may have additional charge metrics that are not covered under this program. Cloud services are discounted at 32%. Software programs are delegated as an entitlement ratio of required license entitlements for the eligible cloud services. The ratios indicate the number of IBM watsonx Virtual Processor Cores (VPCs) required to obtain a discount for that individual service or charge metric on cloud.

Table 1. Discount percentages and entitlement ratios

Activating discounts

BYOL to SaaS can be activated at any time by Administrators of paid accounts (either Pay-as-you-go or Subscription). It cannot be used with unpaid accounts (Lite or Trial).

Before activating BYOL to SaaS, gather the following information:

• The services that you want to include in BYOL to SaaS for watsonx.
• The number of Virtual Processor Cores (VPCs) required. See Table 1 to determine the VPC requirement for your workload.

You need to be the Account Owner or Administrator for the IBM Cloud Account to activate BYOL to SaaS discount.

Follow these steps to enable discounts for each service:

1. Choose Administration > Account and billing > BYOL to SaaS.
2. Before you continue, carefully review the Terms and Conditions.
3. Click Add discount to get started.
4. Select a cloud service from the list of eligible cloud services. Confirm the qualifying plan.
5. Select the software program from the list of software programs.
6. The required minimum number of VPCs for the Software Program Edition is automatically entered. Click the arrows to increase or decrease the number of entitlements. You cannot enter a value lower than the required minimum. The total number of VPCs for all services cannot exceed 350 without approval from your IBM representative.
7. Check the box to confirm the eligibility of your license entitlements and agree to the terms and conditions.
8. Click Apply when finished.

Discounts are applied retroactively to the first day of the monthly billing cycle.

The applied VPCs are not available for on-premises use while enabled for BYOL to SaaS for watsonx.

Deactivating discounts

BYOL to SaaS for watsonx can be deactivated per cloud service at any time.

Follow these steps to deactivate the discount for a service:

1. Hover over or click the cloud service.
2. Select Remove from the overflow menu.
3. Click Remove in the confirmation box to confirm the removal of the discount from the service.

Discounts for the selected services stop at the end of the current billing period, and the Program Licenses are placed back into the pool of on-premises licenses.

Updating discounts

You can update the entitlements that are applied to the discount at any time.

To update the discount:

1. Hover over or click the cloud service.
2. Select Edit from the overflow menu.
3. Enter the required changes for the service. You can change the software program or the number of entitlements to be applied to the service.
4. Check the box to confirm the eligibility of your license entitlements and to agree to the terms and conditions if it is not already checked.
5. Click Apply.

Updates to entitlements take effect immediately.

View summary

Click View summary to review a report of your total applied entitlements.

Next Steps

Refer to the Billing and usage page for your Cloud account to view your charges.

Learn more

Parent topic: Managing the Platform