The standard piece of hardware today is pretty hefty even a small 1/2U system.   They come with multiple cores.   You have to do a special order to get anything less than a dual/quad core today.   An enterprise doesn’t order single sockets either.   Kinda silly to save $500 when you can have 2x the power and be able to reuse this system in the future for other purposes.  

They price and only price by physical cores in a system and on all systems their software could potentially run on.  

Business Objects is blowing a potential sale since today we only need something like 6-8 cores worth of power today and making these systems into VMs is ideal.   It isn’t like Enterprises are out to “screw” vendors.   Yes we all want a deal though Enterprises just want to pay for what they use.   If they would just license use of ~8 CPUs (virtual or physical or core) and let us make these VMs they win.  

Even for us to make these physical is a joke.    We have to disable cores and sockets to make us legal.  

So.. BO is blowing it.   They need to grow up and stop making Mainframe’s look cheap with their licensing policies.