Lotus Gives ASPs License to Rent

Lotus Development Corp is giving providers the option of paying the company a flat-rate for ASP licensing. The announcement was the highlight of the company’s new ASP strategy announced Monday (Sep 11th).


Under the new scheme, ASPs who enter a hosting contract with Lotus can pay a monthly fee that covers licenses for Domino, Notes, QuickPlace, Sametime, LearningSpace, SmartSuite, Domino Workflow, Mobile Services for Domino and the vendor’s ASP Solution Pack. It is then up to providers to choose how they bill end-user customers for usage of the products.


Providers can scale up to the top volume rate via a “pay-as-you-grow,” usage-based model whereby ASPs pay only as they acquire monthly customers for applications running on the Lotus platforms.


ASPs who deliver a more restricted range of self-service hosted applications using the ASP Solution Pack can still opt for the monthly, per-user pricing model that Lotus has previously offered.


Lotus also named Oliver Chou as its new VP of ASP strategy on Monday, and announced shipment of its ASP Solution Pack, which includes a bundle of “ready-to-rent” collaborative applications as well as the Lotus Hosting Management System, a provisioning and management tool that provides usage tracking and support for user self-administration. The Solution Pack also supports a wide variety of third-party ISV Web solutions developed on Lotus Domino or IBM WebSphere application server platforms. It was initially launched last October — see related ASPnews.com story, IBM heralds ASP onslaught, Oct 30th 1999.


One of the first vendors to enter the ASP market, Lotus has relaunched its ASP strategy to increase the pace of adoption of its collaborative platforms as online computing solutions.


“We intend to be the leading supplier of collaborative software-as-a-service by providing our ASP and ISV partners with the technology, services and programs they need to speed deployment and foster success for their hosted application efforts,” said Lotus president and CEO Al Zollar. “Behind this strategy is our commitment to deliver a full range of technologies and programs that are flexible enough to support the wide range of ASP business models.”


Several leading Lotus ASP and ISV partners, including Sun Microsystems, iemagine, Encanto Networks Inc., Interliant, netASPx, Berbee and Sonera, joined in the launch to express their support for the company’s ASP strategy.


Lotus took the opportunity of the launch to reiterate the various partner support programs provided to ASPs and ISVs by itself and its parent IBM Corp.

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