Working out of the Novell Inc office in the Sydney suburb of Chatswood, Australia, Brad Jelfs hasn’t taken long to find the most important distributors for the UnixWare offering from Univel Inc, but his fast work has no doubt brought forth well-hidden explosions at his old office at Epping. The solo Univel rep and former Santa Cruz Operation Inc employee has lined up Sydney-based Com Tech Communications Pty Ltd as prime distributor and MUA Pty Ltd as associate distributor for UnixWare, matching existing arrangements under which Santa Cruz has distributed its desktop Unix in Australia. MUA says that its sales accounted for at least 25% of Santa Cruz’s revenues in this area. So what are Com Tech and MUA doing, jeopardising their relations with Santa Cruz in order to market a competiting type of Unix for the Intel-based personal computer? Santa Cruz says its own Unix and UnixWare are not direct competitors, but both Com Tech and MUA plan to take UnixWare to their current Santa Cruz users and show them what it can do – and how it can run Santa Cruz applications. Some suggest that Com Tech, as Australia’s largest Novell distributor, has chosen to side with its most important partner and tough out the inevitable coolness from Santa Cruz. It may consider that it will get better marketing support from Novell and the Univel partnership than it has previously had from the relatively small Santa Cruz operation here. Then there’s Brad Jelf’s claim that more than half the installed NetWare base is interested in integrating with hardware running Unix. It speaks volumes for the market scope of UnixWare, he said. Now he’s marketing the desktop Unix as something of a downsizing environment, as existing Unix mini and mainframe users will be able to take advantage of well integrated Unix on cheap Intel micros. Users that have been successfully running applications on systems which are now nearing the end of their life cycle, such as the NCR Corp Tower, will now be able to right-size to UnixWare systems. So far, comments from Com Tech and MUA suggest that Santa Cruz Unix will still be sold by both companies, but neither tried to shy away from the fact that their decisions will hurt Santa Cruz. Jelfs originally helped Santa Cruz to set up in Australia and has been poached by Univel to be its number one employee in the Asia-Pacific region, responsible for everywhere except for Japan.
