Cryptography company Baltimore Technologies Ltd has introduced new pricing for its public key infrastructure systems. The new pricing scheme includes a sub-$5000 version of Baltimore’s UniCERT 2.3 Certificate Authority, as well as a new model for selling PKI. The company says traditional pricing models for PKI systems have included a per-certificate license charge. Because the number of issued certificates varies over time, this model has made it hard for chief financial officers to establish how much they are spending on PKI. Under the company’s new UniCERT Enterprise Plus scheme, per-certificate pricing charges disappear. Dublin, Ireland-based Baltimore Technologies is a canonical example of the international e-commerce startups which have been able to exploit US export restrictions on strong encryption by writing and selling their 128-bit algorithms outside the US. As new laws ease those export restrictions (CI No 3,497), that window of opportunity will close. Baltimore Technologies has responded by establishing new offices in Boston, Massachusetts and San Mateo, California. The challenge now will be to compete with the American software giants on their own territory.
