Santa Cruz Operation Inc expects to head off some of the momentum Sun Microsystems Inc’s new alliance with Intel Corp generated yesterday when it rallies its Unix-on-Intel supporters around UnixWare 7 at a Big E II event early next year. SCO will describe how it’s raising its operating system game another notch to meet a new set of enterprise requirements presented by Merced, 64- bits, clustering, NC support, scalability, hot-plug PCI and other technologies. Previously SCO has focused – some insiders say mistakenly – on upgrading the installed base before trumpeting hot new technologies. SCO’s initial Big E rah rah event back in 1996 rallied some two dozen supporters around its plan to merge SCO OpenServer with the SVR4 UnixWare source it had acquired from Novell Inc under the guidance of Hewlett-Packard Co. At the time the likes of Compaq, Data General, ICL, Olivetti, Siemens and Unisys plus Intel itself stood behind SCO but once joint development of a single Unix binary with HP went by the wayside and NT’s server credentials grew in stature, it lost some notable supporters to Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris x86 (NCR Corp), while others have consigned Unix to playing NT’s understudy (Unisys) and others are still wavering (Sequent Computer). Nevertheless SCO claims to own 80% of the Unix-on-Intel market and has attracted the attention of Compaq’s Tandem Computer ServerNet marketing team with its clustering capabilities. SCO says 33% of its last 60,000 Unix-on-Intel ships server ships are on Compaq servers. SCO claims the 1996 event was aimed at supporting mid-range servers in the $100,000 price bracket and that Big E II, which coincides with the general release of its merged UnixWare 7 operating system – an OEM and ISV version is supposed to ship by year-end – will describe plan to extend the headroom of its operating system further. SCO says it will application-specific cuts of UnixWare 7 for departmental databases, small and messaging market and intranets. It’ll take UnixWare 7 to its traditional small-to-medium size customers and to its SCO OpenServer accounts in the second half of next year. It’s already touting a UDK Universal Development Kit applications for UnixWare 7, SCO OpenServer and UnixWare 2.x systems.
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