By William Fellows
Santa Cruz Operation Inc says that Compaq Computer Corp is bundling a version of its SMB small business appliance UnixWare release with its new Prosignia NeoWare servers, but hopes its next OEM will be more prepared to shout about the fact. SCO doesn’t even get a name check in Compaq’s press materials so its executives took to the phones yesterday to trumpet its achievement.
SCO says the ‘appliance’ cut of UnixWare has been calved to support devices that provide fixed functions, require no management and come without a keyboard or monitor. They sit under the desktop performing often-used functions including email, printing, file sharing and other network services. The system software provides 90 second failover, SCO claims. SCO counts appliance servers from the likes of Cobalt and the Meridian Snap server as its closest competition. It expects to create new cuts of SMB targeted at the sub-$2,000 workgroup and medium-sized network attached storage space, and also hints at application- specific bundles targeted at groupware and messaging.
SCO is facing increased competition in its traditional small and medium sized business market from Windows NT and the low-end and packaged Unix offerings from Sun, HP and others including the dedicated ‘Raw Iron’ servers dedicated to running Oracle databases that are being peddled by a number of vendors. As a result it is creating new versions of its system software to serve emerging appliance and dedicated application server markets.
Dodging the question of whether it still plans to develop application interoperability in UnixWare for programs developed on the Intel version of Compaq’s Tru64 Digital Unix now that it has hitched its horse to IBM Corp’s Monterey64 version of AIX for IA-64, SCO would only say that it will continue to add APIs wherever possible that will make cross-platform application development and deployment easier.
