Netscape Communications Corp believes integrated email and groupware will be the killer application of 1997, and yesterday announced new Communicator client and SuiteSpot 3.0 server products which it will pitch against market leaders Microsoft BackOffice and Lotus Notes, beginning in the first quarter. Its goal is to win 50% of an intranet market which it expects to reach $10bn by the end of the decade. Although Netscape would also like to upgrade its huge installed base of Navigator users to the software, its plan of abandoning the standalone browser market is likely to lose it a good deal of its fans too. The intent is to crazy-glue the new 4.0 Galileo release of Navigator on to Messenger email, Composer HTML authoring, Collabra file sharing and groupware, and Conference collaboration components, creating a $50 Communicator suite. A $70 version of the client software that adds Calendar and AutoAdmin functions, will also be available. Netscape figures there’s no money or market left to be made for standalone browsers, claiming there are 45 million users of its products, a quarter of which are already using its email facilities. New SuiteSpot 3.0 server applications include Collabra 3.0 group collaboration based on the CollabraShare technology Netscape bought last year; Media 1.0 audio streaming using the Progressive Networks real-time streaming protocol; and Calendar 1.0 scheduling software. There are upgrades of existing Messaging, Enterprise Web server, Proxy content replication and filtering applications, in addition to the recently announced Certificate Server 1.0, Catalog 1.0 and LiveWire 1.0 development suite. Any five of the nine servers plus LiveWire costs $4,000 – they are $1,000 individually. Netscape is also offering enterprise licenses for large organizations at $70 per user for SuiteSpot and $100 for SuiteSpot plus Communicator. Communicator is supported on 17 platforms, including Windows, NT, Mac and Unix – SuiteSpot on Unix and NT. Netscape says und er its enterprise pricing structure a $1,000 user SuiteSpot license will cost $57,900 for 1,000 users and $451,320 for 10,000 users against $73,590 and $735,900 for a similarly configured desktop Lotus Notes installation ($279,590 and $2,795,000 for a full Notes implementation) or $182,018 and $1,820,180 for Microsoft’s BackOffice.
