New chief financial officer and vice-president of operations Alok Mohan, a former NCR Corp workstation general manager, certainly seem to have shaken some life into Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s strategic vision in the three months he’s been there. Santa Cruz executives, including president and chief executive Lars Turndal and vice-president and chief technology officer Doug Michels, last week steeled themselves to outline a long-term plan that will see the company refocus its efforts in three markets: small-to-medium sized business market, branch automation – including replication and mobile computing servers – and point-of-sale systems. Servers rather than desktops. As well as Windows-friendly, reliability, availability and serviceability, symmetric multiprocessing and database technologies, Santa Cruz will be adding easy-to-use systems management to its armoury. In the next release of its operating system technologies – it says between three and nine months off – Santa Cruz will add what it describes as an object-based idiot-proof distributed systems management environment for performing basic tasks like distributing software or updates to multiple sites and administering print resources. Its intent is to interoperate, not to compete with other network and system managers. It enables its technology to be managed, for example, by SNMP managers such as OpenView. That is relatively easy as SNMP is well defined. Less easy is the plan to co-exist with whatever the current crop of systems management efforts throw up. X/Open Co Ltd’s working group has already standardised on at least part of the Tivoli environment – Open Software Foundation and former COSE efforts are less well understood; perhaps even in conflict according to some accounts. That is why Santa Cruz is keeping its people on those committees, it says, indeed it still chairs the COSE working group in that area.
