Islandia, New York-based Computer Associates International Inc has bitten the bullet on software pricing in an age of open systems so that its customers can downsize or consolidate their systems without needing an accountancy degree to work out the software pricing implications. A new investment savings plan gives customers a residual value or credit for licences that become redundant when multiple CPUs are replaced by fewer but larger CPUs. The credit is based on the original fee reduced by a factor reflecting usage over time, and can be applied toward the upgrade fee, resulting in reductions of up to 50%. An upgrade savings plan for customers paying tiered prices means that they can run the licensed program on any size CPU as long as the licence is active. On maintenance, for a one-time subscription fee of 30% of the current list price, annual maintenance fees will be cut 40%. An enterprise licence program for big organisations allows a specific product to be used anywhere within the enterprise on as many CPUs as required, as long as all CPUs and sites are identified. The fee is based on the total number of MIPS installed. A rightsizing savings plan means that wherever customers exchange products of equal functionality – such as CA-Unicenter MVS for CA-Unicenter Unix, they can take the same credit offered under the investment savings plan. To qualify, users have to be on the Total Client Care programme.
