Corel Sweetens Pot With Suite System Builder Rebate
Starting today, system builders that buy three copies of the company's WordPerfect/Quattro Pro "three-pack" bundle will get a $50 refund. That puts the per-seat price of Corel's word processor and spreadsheet to VARs at roughly $16, down from $22 as part of the previously announced promotion, said Brett Denly, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Corel, Ottawa.
The vendor's Productivity Pack for system builders contains three copies each of WordPerfect and Quattro Pro for about $66.
>> CORELDRAW GRAPHICS SUITE 12: New OEM price is $127. A new $50 rebate drops the price for system builders to $77.
That's not all. System builders that want to bundle the popular CorelDraw Graphics Suite 12 can now receive OEM pricing for the first time. The new price for CorelDraw, which retails for $399, is now $127, and system builders can get a $50 rebate on top of that, Denly said. Both rebate programs end Nov. 30.
While Microsoft Office--which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook--remains dominant, Corel offers what system builders agree is a file-compatible alternative spreadsheet and word processor at a fraction of Office's cost. Most system builders say they pay $140 to $160 per copy of Office.
Victor De La Torre, owner of V-Net Consulting, Miami, said WordPerfect Office 12, which has been shipping since spring, has given Corel a new lease on life. "We had one 150-seat client ready to move to Microsoft Office. After we showed them WordPerfect 12 for 30 days, they went with Corel instead," De La Torre said.
Corel's inclusion of a PDF generator with its word processor is a big boon for law firms, which in Florida must save documents in Adobe's PDF format, De La Torre said. With Microsoft Office, customers would have to pay several hundred dollars per seat for an Acrobat PDF generator atop the Office price, he said.