Novell Cuts Software Prices

New pricing plan will reduce license fees for customers who make the software available as Web services to their customers.

Novell Inc. announced Tuesday a new pricing plan across its software product lines that will reduce license fees for customers who make the software available as Web services to their customers.

The new pricing plan creates two new categories for user licenses, "business-to-consumer" and "government-to-citizen," so as to make Web services more affordable to large sets of users, Novell officials said. Pricing for software made available to employees and suppliers remains the same.

The business-to-consumer license will be priced at just 25 percent of the standard user license, while the government-to-citizen user license is just 10 percent of the standard license price.

Chris Stone, vice chairman, office of the CEO, at Novell, in Provo, Utah, said typical per-user software license models make it difficult for companies to deploy software as Web services to large numbers of users.

"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," Stone said in a statement touting Novells new plan.

For all its categories, Novell is charging fees based on the number of users, not on the number of devices accessing the software.

The new pricing models are limited to Novell Corporate License Agreement and Master License Agreement customers. Customers who qualify must still pay standard license pricing for use of the software by their own employees and suppliers. Outsourcers do not qualify for the reduced license fees.

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