Lotus plans pricing overhaul

Lotus has promised a simpler and more aggressive pricing scheme, and will make its products available to buy over the Internet.

The scheme is likely to be good news for customers baffled by the company's current licence labyrinth. Pricing details will be available by the end of March.

"We will have a new pricing scheme that doesn't require the customer to be quite the rocket scientist they have had to be in the past," departing chief executive Jeff Papows told an audience of some 5000 customers and developers at Lotusphere in Orlando.

Papows said pricing would be based on six types of product, including messaging, collaboration and Domino. He blamed the market's perception of Lotus as a one product vendor - first of 123, then of Notes - for blurring the issue of pricing of lesser-known products.

"As the portfolio expanded we failed to keep up with pricing," he said.

Clive Longbottom, an analyst at researcher Strategy Partners, said: "This makes it a lot clearer. Right now you don't know what it will cost if you go for this option or that option, so people have stuck with what they've got."

Papows also announced plans to sell Lotus products online. The scheme, called ePass, will be launched later this year.

Lotus, which is subsidiary of IBM, claims to have 20,000 business partners and around 56 million Notes users.