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.

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."