By Timothy Prickett Morgan
The Santa Cruz Operation yesterday took the wraps off an improved set of Tarantella web-to-host middleware that brings native support for Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). The new program, which is called Tarantella Enterprise II, will start shipping in January 2000. With the RDP support, customers can drop a Tarantella server between their legacy applications and web users and support applications running on Windows Terminal Server, without having to distribute client-side software to end users. The existing Tarantella provides the same web-enablement for Unix, AS/400 and mainframe applications. The fact that companies using Tarantella can enable users to work from normal web browsers rather than browsers augmented with client-side access programs or specialized Windows clients is what separates Tarantella from similar programs such as Citrix WinFrame and MetaFrame, says SCO’s Howard Fried, director of product marketing for the Tarantella line. In fact, says Fried, Tarantella Enterprise II is positioned to compete with Citrix in the Windows market starting in January and will pre-empt Citrix’ plan to enter the Unix connectivity market next year.
Tarantella can support up to 400 users per server and is itself a server-side Java application that runs on Sun Solaris, Hewlett- Packard HP-UX, IBM AIX, SCO UnixWare, Compaq Tru64, and Siemens Reliant Unixes. Companies can obviously cluster servers together (depending on the clustering software in the Unix environment they choose) to offer web-to-host capabilities for thousands or tens of thousands of concurrent users with Tarantella. Tarantella Enterprise II costs $4,925 for a 25-user, multi-server license, with the standard discounts as the number of users increases.
Tarantella has been shipping since October 1997, and was largely an experimental product until last April when SCO released an enterprise-ready version of the product. The company says that the Tarantella product supports over 350,000 users worldwide, although a large number of those users come through sales of UnixWare 7, which includes a version of Tarantella as the webtop front-end for UnixWare. In January 2000, SCO says that it will put out yet another release of Tarantella Enterprise II that is tailored to the small and medium business market. SMB customers typically support smaller numbers of users and do not need the full protocol support that the full Tarantella suite offers, so look for SCO to offer special bundles with only one or two web- to-host emulations supported for a lower price. In February 2000, SCO will announce another release of Tarantella Enterprise II that is tailored for the ASP market. ASPs needs to support users who do not exactly fit the concurrent user profile of its existing pricing model; they also have specific technical requirements, particularly in the area of management, that the normal enterprise does not have to contend with. During the second half of 2000, SCO will be moving from Java 1.1.7 development to Java 2 and will also start rolling in support for non-PC computing devices such as PDAs and cell phones.
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