TM1 Forum

Hi Everyone,

Is there any free 'tm1/planning analytics' version that i can download on my local device?

on ibm website they give one month free trial for planning analytics but has very limited features.

pleas let me know..

sairajsoma wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2025 7:08 am Is there any free 'tm1/planning analytics' version that i can download on my local device?

Oh, sure! There's a free Developer Edition which has full functionality for non-production use, including a complete OLAP suite... oh wait, no, that's Microsoft SQL Server that I'm thinking of. It's one reason why SQL Server's market share keeps growing, since people have the chance to learn the product, understand it, and get a feel for how good it is. It's called smart and intelligent marketing, but I can imagine the words floating through the corridors of IBM... "We don't do that kind of thing here". And that, plus its cost, is why Planning Analytics is a radar blip that relatively few people outside of existing TM1 sites have ever heard of. (As I know from the experience of training a LOT of new users over the years.)

Sorry, I wish it were otherwise.

Also unlike... a lot of software that isn't IBM's... you can pretty much forget about getting a cheap cloud based solution for developing / learning / proof of concept either. The prices and licencing terms change from time to time, but they're... spicy.

There used to be casual licencing for the Planning Analytics cloud based service; that is, just get it for as long as you need it. It wasn't cheap, but at least it existed. Well, it did on the IBM Italia site which is where I have an account, but it was pulled a few years back. I'm not sure whether it was ever available in Australia, much less anywhere else in the world.

In February 2023 you could get a single licence in Australia for a monthly cost of $AUD2,695.19. I doubt that you could get it for only 1 month, not that that is an amount that I would consider "affordable" for learning the product anyway. Oh, did I mention that that was for a whopping 32 Gig of RAM? No? Most of my data cubes won't get out of bed for 32 gig, but sure, you can pay 2.7 grand a month for the computing power of a K-Mart laptop.

So you can imagine how astonished I was on 16 October last year when I found that the price had dropped and you could get a licence for 5 users for a mere $AUD1,808.58 per month. To be fair, that would actually be affordable for a small business with a discounted annual cost of $AUD21,703, allowing for the fact that it would be tax deductible.

BUT... it's still with only 32 Gig of RAM, so... still pretty much functionally useless, then.

sairajsoma wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2025 7:08 am on ibm website they give one month free trial for planning analytics but has very limited features.

You ain't kidding.

Trial users cannot use Applications and Plans.
Trial users cannot use the modeling workbench to create and modify model objects such as dimensions, cubes, and rules.
Trial users can use Planning Analytics Administration to configure, monitor, and administer a Planning Analytics Workspace environment, but cannot create a new Planning Analytics database.

So, it's basically like walking into a car showroom, and the dealer telling you that no, you can't take it out for a test drive but you can sit in the driver's seat and make "vroom, vroom!" noises for a while.

Unfortunately, then... I have no good news for you.

Yes, Agree!!!.
Thanks for the reply.

Not the perfect option for the average person just wanting to learn but in terms of wanting to create/contribute to open source projects etc. my understanding is that IBM made access to the "Software Access Catalogue" free for IBM partners at some point over the last few years.
I'm not sure on the exact requirements to become an IBM partner (I expect it varies slightly by region) but I know a lot of contractors do set up as partners; I certainly did back when I was contracting (a number of years ago) and at that point I used to pay a (to me reasonable) yearly fee for access to the catalogue.

I expect for some people who search for this sort of topic it could be something worth investigating and for others probably not.
Always read through the agreements to understand what is being offered and what responsibilities you are agreeing to comply with.

One thing to keep in mind with Planning Analytics though is the minimum hardware requirements for a local install (especially if you want a reasonable dataset and all interfaces.)

declanr wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2025 3:28 pm Not the perfect option for the average person just wanting to learn but in terms of wanting to create/contribute to open source projects etc. my understanding is that IBM made access to the "Software Access Catalogue" free for IBM partners at some point over the last few years.
I'm not sure on the exact requirements to become an IBM partner (I expect it varies slightly by region)

If one believes the initial paragraph on the Partner program home page,

IBM wrote:The IBM Partner Plus program is designed to help businesses like yours access leading technology to help you grow - whether you’re a startup or an established company.

I find that IBM is incapable of communicating clearly, and assumes that everyone lives inside its own collective thought bubble. ("But you should understand what we mean! Everyone here does!") Naturally, it fails to say anything about what "businesses like yours" might be.

However we can glean the target audience from 1 minute 9 seconds into the embedded video on that page:

IBM Presenter wrote:"Whether you sell, build or service with IBM technology, IBM Partner Plus offers all partners enhanced support and benefits, insider access and competitive incentives.

Pretty much the remainder of the video is about sales and earnings and finding new clients, yada yada. It doesn't explicitly say anything about getting access to the software catalogue, but it DOES say that all of the training available to IBM sales and technical staff is available to partners.

Thus I get the impression that to get access to the partner program:

• You need to be in the business of selling technology solutions;
• That could mean reselling IBM solutions, or selling solutions with IBM tech embedded in them. On this page the three alternative paths to partnership are "Build with IBM technology", "Sell IBM technology" or "Service IBM technology";
• Most importantly, above all else, sopratutto, most vitally... you need to be generating cashy-money for IBM; and
• IBM needs to not collectively hate your living guts. Oh, wait, that's just a "me" thing. Never mind. Also... "back atcha, IBM".

I haven't been able to determine the number of IBM Partners, but an IT media company called CRN estimates it at 55,000. If you look at all the technology users in the world, that's not a huge number; especially considering it's across all IBM products, and not just Planning Analytics. That suggests that partnerships are not easy to come by.

Also, as per my third point above and quoting from the CRN article:

CRN wrote:IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna revealed during the vendor’s annual Think conference that recent investments in its partner program have grown the percent of “revenue associated with the ecosystem” from about 15 percent to about 40 percent—and he wants that number to double to about 80 percent.

As I said, partnerships these days are all about the money, honey.

declanr wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2025 3:28 pm I expect for some people who search for this sort of topic it could be something worth investigating and for others probably not.

True. It wouldn't do any good for:

• Someone coming out of IT studies and wanting to learn the technology;
• Someone looking to retrain; but most critically of all for the future of the product
• End user companies that want to do a proof of concept at their own pace to see whether the product is a good fit.

declanr wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2025 3:28 pm Always read through the agreements to understand what is being offered and what responsibilities you are agreeing to comply with.

If you can. IBM "agreements" tend to be written in the legalese dialect of the bloviation language. The syntax of unexplained, in house jargon is liberally sprinkled over the top. They tend to have all of the clarity and transparency of a 90 year old's cataracts. That's why I dumped dealing with licence renewals further up the chain; life is way too short to be dealing with that, and I'm not paid enough to do it. Unfortunately nobody else wants to deal with it either and licence renewal time becomes a game of "pass the parcel".