Microsoft Corp threw a line to struggling Banyan Systems Inc yesterday by paying $10m for warrants enabling it to buy 7.5% of Banyan’s stock at $10 a share, while having Banyan train 500 employees on enterprise services over a three year period to increase the interoperability of the companies’ products. The stock warrants have a lock-in based on the continuation of the alliance. The $10 exercise price is based on an agreed premium over a 30-day trading average. Banyan’s crown jewels are its StreetTalk directory services that operate on Windows NT. Microsoft’s own Active Directory services won’t ship until Windows 2000 is available, and in the meantime Redmond is trailing Novell Inc which is peddling its Novell Directory Services free of charge to the NT base. Banyan has pretty much given up on its own operating system, Vines as far as we can tell. Banyan and Microsoft are to work on developing packaged services based on Microsoft’s enterprise platform. More details are due tomorrow.
