Novell has no further designs on acquiring Unix Labs outright – at least not for now

Last week at the Univel Inc launch in Dallas, our sister paper Unigram.X sidled up to Novell Inc chief Ray Noorda and asked him flat out what the chances were that he would buy Unix System Laboratories Inc. Pretty slim, he replied, citing an unwillingness to fragment the industry further. We bought into Unix, he said, to try to unify it. But timing is also an issue with him, which makes Unigram think he has not abandoned the idea entirely. Meanwhile his Univel project with Unix Labs is starting to hum. Now that it has a published price list, it can start to take orders. Although it can’t start booking them until it starts to deliver product on November 30, president Joel Applebaum expects it to be profitable its first fiscal quarter of operations, which ends in February. If Univel moves 100,000 units, regardless of whether they’re the client-side Personal Editions or the Application Servers, by the end of its first fiscal year, it will be profitable, he says – and it already has a revenue stream from its education courses. And it still has some of the $30m cash that it received as its dowry. And 10 months after its creation, it has a payroll of about 100 people.

Univel reckons that the Personal Edition can squeeze onto a 25MHz 80386SX box with 80Mb disk

Univel is recommending a minimum 25MHz 80386SX box fitted with 8Mb RAM and 80Mb of disk to run its Personal Edition client and a 33MHz 80386 with 12Mb internal and a 120Mb hard disk for its Application Server, plus a Video Graphics Array or better Extended Graphics Array is also supported. A tape drive or CD-ROM is required for local installation. The Personal Edition will boot up and run with 6Mb and uses about 55Mb for system files and swapping space. The server will boot and run with 8Mb and uses about 85Mb for system files and swapping space. It says it takes an hour to install Personal Edition. There are some 500 systems and peripherals on Univel’s compatability list.

European representatives of Univel see a slow ramp-up for UnixWare on this side of the water

Following the US launch of UnixWare, Univel Inc’s European representatives say a revenue stream from this side of the Atlantic will not begin to flow for at least three months. Bernard Moing, Univel’s regional marketing manager for Europe says we’re not expecting any returns on UnixWare until the first quarter of 1993, and then the take-up will be limited for a further period. This means that Univel’s plans to derive 50% of its revenues from Europe by 1996 will be getting off to a slow start. Univel will initially focus on Germany, France and the UK, those with the strongest Novell Inc NetWare bases, and plans for the the rest of Europe will follow. French, German, Spanish and Italian language versions of UnixWare will be available by the end of the year.

Legato’s Motif-based cross-system back-up and recovery software is cooking for early next year

Legato Systems Inc intends making its Motif-based cross-system back-up and recovery software, Legato Networker, available for UnixWare around the first of the year. It’s just come out with Networker for 80386 machines supporting Santa Cruz Unix and MS-DOS and will include UnixWare in the same ClientPak II down the road. Networker will back up UnixWare to either NetWare or Unix servers such as RS/6000s or Sparc boxes via TCP/IP. Backup media will be interchangeable between the Networker back-up server for NetWare and the one for Unix. ClientPak II lists for $1,500. Networker servers software will be sold separately starting at $2,000.

Implementations for non-Intel processors seem to be off the back burner and back in the fridge

Univel looks to be backing off its original commitment to do implementations of UnixWare for non-Intel Corp iAPX-86 processors like the Sparc. It says its first and second priorities are both Intel. Personal reasons for doing Sparc and R-series versions do remain.

Distributed Processing reveals its contribution

Distributed Processing Techno

logy Inc, a Maitland, Florida manufacturer of SCSI peripheral controllers, reports that its SmartCache Plus controllers have been integrated into the UnixWare operating system. The SmartCache Plus EISA SCSI controllers provide access to a range of SCSI peripherals. The company says it started working with Univel early in the development cycle of UnixWare to ensure high performance and compatability with many peripherals. It provides support for concurrent input-output processing, enabling multiple read and write requests to be processed simultaneously; scatter-gather data transfer, which increases data throughput; and support for hardware-based disk cacheing and disk mirroring. SmartCache Plus is claimed to be the only SCSI controller on the market that can be configured as either a non-cacheing or a cacheing controller.