Unix-on-NT company Softway Systems Inc is making good on those promised OEM customers (CI No 3,362), adding Unisys Corp and Intergraph Corp to the roster of companies reselling OpenNT. Softway, which landed Dell Computer Corp a few weeks ago (CI No 3,381), is starting out by signing deals that bundle OpenNT on systems which vendors sell to US government organizations, although every deal also carries general availability rights. Softway says its new OEMs will use OpenNT as a competitive platform against Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris Unix offerings in the government space. Some vendors do as much as 25% of their business on government contracts. Unisys is putting OpenNT – which effectively enables Unix applications to be re-hosted on NT – up on its ClearPath Intel SMP servers. Intergraph’s offering OpenNT on its TDZ 2000 ViZual workstations. OpenNT enables customers to run Unix applications on top of Windows NT. Softway says it will have a couple of hundred VARs selling OpenNT solutions by year-end. It finds enterprise customers little interested in actually scrapping existing C++ or Visual Basic work or in deploying Java applications. However most, it says, are strategically interested in using Java as a universal graphical user interface above and beyond Win32 or Unix. Meantime, Ada Core Technologies Inc has ported its GNAT Ada 95 compiler Windows NT and Softway’s OpenNT. The company says it enables Ada applications developed for Unix to be re-deployed on NT while retaining 100% of their original functionality.
