Lotus Introduces New Server Structure, Slashes Prices

By JOHN FONTANA

IBM's Lotus Development Corp. today unveiled a new server and reduced prices for its current servers and client access licenses.

The new server, dubbed the Domino Enterprise Server, contains several products that Lotus already offers separately for building high availability, scalability and fault tolerance into Domino. The new server provides customers with a single package including clustering, billing and partitioning--all services that were previously available as Domino Advanced Services. The server will be licensed for u se on machines with more than four CPUs.

"We found that customers want some form of clustering and they wanted all the components to do that in a single package," said Sean Loiselle, group manager for server marketing at Lotus.

The server, which will be available July 1, is priced at $3,195.

Also on the server side, Lotus lowered the price of its Domino Mail Server from $995 to $695. Lotus also eliminated its single processor server, which was priced at $1,495, making its 2-4 CPU multiprocessor its base Domino server. That server, which was a $2,000 upgrade from the single processor server, will now cost $1,795.

Along with the new server structure, Lotus will introduce new client access licensing.

Lotus will now require non-Notes clients that access Domino applications to have a license. The Domino Groupware Client Access License (CAL) will be needed for every name that appears in the Lotus directory, including employees, a company's independent contractors and third-party partners. The G roupware CAL is priced at $30 plus an $8 annual fee for maintenance. Existing users who access Domino for non-mail applications will only be required to pay the annual renewal fee of $8..

Lotus also renamed its mail-only CAL and adjusted the price. The Domino Access License, which allowed access to the Domino server from a choice of clients, is now called Domino Mailbox Client Access License. It gives users access to mail, calendaring and scheduling, document libraries and discussions. The price has been dropped from $45 to $30, including a year of maintenance. The renewal fee is $8.

Notes Mail clients and Notes Desktop clients will include the Mailbox CAL and Mailbox and Groupware CAL, respectively. The licensing for the Notes client, which includes both the mail and groupware access, is still $69.

All of the changes are effective on July 1.

Loiselle said Lotus is adjusting its pricing model based on three trends that are appearing in the industry: the inclusion of Internet standards in prod ucts, the migration of much of the application functionality and processing from the client to the server, and the increased customer demand for multiprocessor servers.