Last month Idiom announced participants in the beta test for its program to tailor and sell its WorldServer product to language service providers. In July Idiom said the license was free and that it would charge only a “modest” support fee to the LSPs who availed themselves of the program.

This week we touched base with CEO Mike Iacobucci and marketing VP Dave Rosenlund to find out whether Idiom’s definition of “modest” is aligned with ours — at US$8,750 per year, we’d say it is. This payment entitles LSPs to the full support menu that Idiom gives to its enterprise clients such as Adobe and Oracle: toll-free telephone and online tech support, a user portal, and the ability to log and track problems; access to all product updates; and discounts on training and professional services. Iacobucci added an interesting twist to the support deal — it’s optional. If the LSP doesn’t want to fork over $8,750 per year, it can pay nothing and instead turn to a free Yahoo! group that Idiom set up for its support organization and other users of WorldServer.

We asked whether the field test customers had experienced a different set of issues than Idiom’s corporate customers. Rosenlund said the biggest concern was integrating homegrown or COTS billing and job tracking systems with Idiom’s software, but that they could do so with the WorldServer SDK (software development kit).

The two execs said that some of the beta test LSPs were a bit incredulous over the unexpectedly low price. Consider the alternatives they have had to date: 1) buy GXT, TeamWorks, or Translation Management System from SDL, a competitor in language services about which many LSPs feel uncomfortable or 2) build a process, project, and translation workflow system themselves, a long-term expensive proposition whether they use a CMS or database under the covers. Both those approaches require an initial software license fee, development, integration, and higher annual maintenance costs.

The benefits to Idiom are getting an active test bed of users who will stress the product in new ways, put its product in front of more users, and challenge rival SDL in a market where it has less strength. Near term it won’t make Idiom a lot of money but the LSP Advantage shows promise as a way to gain access to new enterprise accounts via language service providers uncomfortable with introducing SDL technology to their translation customers.