Santa Cruz Operation Inc is rolling out, nay, rushing to market, the 1.1 version of its Tarantella application broker for network computing, the original 1.0 having shipped in November last year (CI No 3,279). Senior VP for marketing Ray Anderson explained that the urgency to bring the new version onto the market was dictated by the speed with which clients had required an upgrade from environments with 50-100 users to ones with thousands. Thanks to a new facility called Tarantella Array, this can now be done by linking up a series of smaller servers, rather than bringing more expensive high-end machines into play. Another additional feature in Tarantella 1.1 is the ability to detect the presence of a client running an old 3.1 version of Windows, which would have problems running Java applications. Anderson said the broker software not only detects that it is communicating with this client but switches over automatically to download native Windows code rather than Java. While the company is still not in a position to be able to announce any OEMs as yet, Andersen said a couple of major partners are lined up and will start to roll out Tarantella over the next few months. The main thrust of SCO’s marketing efforts for the broker is, of course, the large organization with a wide audience, running into the thousands, for its applications. That said, however, Anderson revealed that the company is currently working on supporting very low-end devices, all the way down to, as proof of concept, the $49 Nintendo Game Boy. The logic behind this effort is the search, as Anderson put it, for the dirty fingernail market. In other words, a farmer in the field might need information on, say, a new species of parasite he’s just found on his crops, but wants to get it on a cheap, robust hand-held device, rather than have to run it back to the farmhouse to check on his database. For the user organization, argued SCO’s marketing executive, the advantage represented by Tarantella is that it is a cheaper alternative to writing all its apps in Java, as existing programs in other languages can be delivered by the broker without the need for re-writing. Will its existence then slow the spread of Java? Possibly in some cases, but then, on the other hand, companies will be able to devote their time to writing new applications in Java rather than re-writing their old Cobol, Unix or Windows APPs, argued Anderson. The new version of the broker will begin to ship next month, going live for downloading on the company’s web site on May 11.
