Corel Inks WordPerfect Bundle With Gateway

This is the third big OEM deal Corel won, apparently over Microsoft, in the past few months.

Plans call for Gateway 300 Series desktop models to ship with WordPerfect 10 word processing and Quattro Pro 10 spreadsheet applications preinstalled, according to Corel, based here. Buyers of the Gateway PCs can upgrade to the full WordPerfect suite, which adds presentation and calendar apps, and to a professional edition, which adds the Paradox database.

A Corel spokeswoman estimated that the Gateway bundle deal represents about 500,000 to 700,000 PCs over the next 12 months.

Corel has aggressively pitched bundling deals and won some high-profile consumer preloads on select retail PCs, including Dell Computer and Hewlett-Packard machines. (See related story.) Most of those PCs had been offered with applications from Microsoft, whose Office productivity suite--with its component Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps--still dominates the corporate desktop, although some industry observers say Corel has made some headway on the retail end. Microsoft Works, a lower-end application bundle, is typically used on retail PCs, observers said.

On the corporate front, Microsoft Office is also seeing some competition from OpenOffice, an open-source productivity suite, and StarOffice, Sun Microsystems' version of that software.

IBM's Lotus Software group is also working on an upgrade to its SmartSuite due by year's end, a spokeswoman there said.