Business Objects makes prices Crystal clear

Licensing charges are increased to balance cheaper support costs

Rachel Fielding in San Jose, California

Business Objects has changed the support and licensing costs for some Crystal Decision products, but customers are unlikely to see a change to their total costs.

Outlining its product road map following its acquisition of Crystal Decision, Business Objects said software maintenance costs would be set at 20 per cent across both product lines.

Advertisement

This marks a five per cent reduction for Crystal customers, from 25 per cent. But software licensing for some modules has also been changed.

Lance Walter, director of product marketing at Business Objects, told vnunet.com: "Our goal is to integrate pricing and packaging of both Business Objects and Crystal products in a way that is most seamless for customers. For the average customer, the overall cost of software will remain the same."

Software licences for Crystal Enterprise and Crystal Analysis are both being increased by around 15 per cent on a per user basis, although the cost of Crystal Reports will remain unchanged.

Meanwhile all product licences are now available on both a named user and CPU (or per machine) basis except full client, desktop products.

The CPU pricing model is a first for Business Objects. But the company is refusing to embrace the concurrent user pricing model in use by Crystal.

Dave Kellogg, senior group vice president of worldwide marketing at Business Objects, told vnunet.com: "We're leaving Crystal on it but we're not putting Business Objects on it. It's two product lines so while I don't think it's ideal, I don't think it's a big problem.

"Concurrent pricing is very difficult to do unless you can enforce it. Crystal has the right mechanisms in place."

Neal Thompson, director of strategic business technologies at travel and incentive company Maritz, said he expected to shave around 20 per cent off his bottom line costs of using both Business Objects and Crystal products over the next year as a result of the acquisition.

"We'll be able to leverage a single skill set rather than relying on pockets of expertise, and the acquisition offers more options for scaling upwards," he said.

"What will help the most is getting the infrastructure; currently extracting data from two different databases is very expensive and the support and maintenance of two different platforms that goes with that."

  • Have your say
  • Send to a friend
  • Print
  • Digg
  • Reddit
  • Share

Tags:

Do you agree?

Related whitepapers

Related jobs

Most watched

Xperia X1

Video Review: Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

First Looks Editor Ian Williams gets hands on with the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

iPhone

Video Review: iPhone 3GS

We put Apple's latest iPhone through its paces

IT white papers

Search white papers

Top categories

Poll

Poll: Summer smartphones

Poll: Summer smartphones

Which smartphone will you be taking to the beach this summer?

View poll results

Advertisement

Advertisement

Newsletter signup

Sign up for our range of FREE newsletters:

Existing User

Newsletter user login:

Enter email address to edit your newsletter preferences

Job of the week

Search thousands of IT jobs :

Search thousands of IT jobs:

Advanced search

Hiring now on ComputingCareers:

Related IT jobs

Search thousands of IT jobs :

Search thousands of IT jobs:

Advanced search

Spotlight

a padlock

Microsoft to plug security holes

Microsoft has given advance warning of a number of security...

Nokia handset

Top 10 articles, 10 July 09

No Nokia Android phone, ActiveX attacks and Google enters into...

Can Google beat Microsoft at its own game?

Google's announcement this week that it plans to step into...

iPhone

Video Review: iPhone 3GS

We put Apple's latest iPhone through its paces

Primary Navigation