Sun Microsystems Inc will stir up the Unix brew again by announcing tomorrow that Amdahl Corp is to cease further development of its UTS Unix and become an OEM customer for Solaris, today’s edition of our sister paper Unigram.X reports. It’s understood that Amdahl parent, Fujitsu Ltd, plus sister company ICL Plc won’t be following in its footsteps. The move sets Sun on a course to challenge Novell Inc’s UnixWare gambit and it will not be content with just the Amdahl deal. SunSoft recently set up a SWAT team to woo the top 20 Unix OEM customers and the high-volume Intel Corp houses to Solaris. Amdahl, worried about Novell’s focus on the desktop, is expected to co-develop Solaris, adding the mainframe features currently found in UTS, its version of Unix, which it cannot afford to develop further alone. These enhancements will return to Sun for incorporation into the generic version of Solaris, strengthening its offering at the high end. The changeover is expected to begin in the second quarter of next year with the release of Solaris 2.4, though Amdahl is expected to retain UTS for a while. Amdahl is also expected to market SunServer 1000 and SparcCenter 2000 multiprocessors. As long as Amdahl’s Solaris implementation conforms to the 1,170 APIs in the proposed unified Unix, there should be no conflict with the coming Fujitsu-ICL-Amdahl common Unix environment.
