In the short term, Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s new Leeds-based Visionware Ltd unit will be open for business as usual. Santa Cruz Operation has price-listed Visionware’s personal computer X server software for some years. But in the medium term, the plan now being drummed up by IXI Ltd boss Ray Anderson’s transition team is to find ways of combining Santa Cruz’s operating system products with IXI’s Eye2Eye personal computer-to-Unix integration technology and Visionware’s personal computer-to-Unix communications services as bundled solutions packages for organisations with Unix and Windows requirements. More host capabilities and tighter desktop-server integration are seen as obvious initial enhancements. A natural extension of Santa Cruz’s Windows-friendly initiative, the strategy will be the opposite of Windows-on-Unix, Wabi-style. As Santa Cruz sees it, these kinds of systems are destined for the niche product drawer in any case, what with X/Open Co Ltd’s avowed disinterest in such things and Sun Microsystems Inc’s mounting campaign to embrace the personal computer world with its SolarNet technologies. This year will see the beginning of a wider struggle between Unix-only vendors and the integrationists, Santa Cruz believes.
