New Novell Pricing Makes Providing Services Over the Internet More Affordable

To help organizations meet the growing demand from their customers and constituents for services via the Internet, Novell today launched a software pricing program that makes such services more affordable by tailoring pricing to the type of end-user. Now, in addition to traditional pricing for an organization's employee users, Novell offers significantly discounted "Business-to-Consumer" and "Government-to-Citizen" user license pricing.

"Expensive software licensing models have prevented organizations from affordably extending services to customers across the Web," said Chris Stone, vice chairman, office of the CEO, Novell. "Novell is changing this by providing a significant opportunity for businesses who are offering customers software services over the Internet and to government agencies who offer such services to citizens. Other major vendors have licensing plans that make Internet solutions impractical because license fees are the same for both employee and customer use of a software service, despite vastly different levels of usage and benefits."

Novell's pricing program creates two new categories of discounted user licenses to make affordable Web services available to very large user communities. While Novell's standard user license remains the license for employees and suppliers, the Business-to-Consumer user license price is only 25 percent of the standard user license and the Government-to-Citizen user license is only 10 percent of the standard price. For all three categories, Novell charges based on the number of individual users of a software service, not the number of computing devices connected to the network. Novell's approach avoids the steep license penalties assessed by some other major vendors when they require a license for each computer or PDA used to access a software service.

"Organizations are looking for system software pricing which is both equitable and simple for them to understand," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software research for analyst firm IDC. "To be equitable, pricing guidelines must recognize that Web-based systems have many different types of users. Organizations don't think that it's either fair or equitable when suppliers expect them to pay the same license fee for a potential customer merely glancing at an online catalog as they do for software supporting a dedicated, full-time employee."

Novell's new license pricing will help organizations reduce costs and give them significant competitive value in the markets they serve. The Business-to-Consumer and Government-to-Citizen licenses will make it easier for businesses and government agencies to provide customers and citizens with secure access to services and information such as bank accounts or government records. Additional information on Novell licensing can be found at http://www.novell.com/licensing/consumer.