Development partners already secured for 3DA include NEC Corp which, through a MIPS ABI Group initiative called Golden Gate, will create an R-series RISC implementation from Santa Cruz Operation’s OEM offering. Hitachi Ltd, which offers PA-RISC and iAPX-86 systems, also promises support for other leading CPUs (it’s still supposed to be a PowerPC shop). Novell Inc is integrating NetWare print, file and directory services. A Sparc implementation will be landed through the Fujitsu Ltd companies (although ICL Plc, which implemented UnixWare 2.0 for Sparc, doesn’t know whether it’s got the development ticket yet). A wider partnering jamboree designed to attract the independent software vendor community is being prepared for next month, when iAPX-86-based server vendors such as NCR Corp, Unisys Corp and ICL and others are expected to detail more specific plans to support 3DA technology. Unisys chief executive James Unruh – to the chagrin of his client-server lieutenants – has already let slip his company’s plan to abandon its own general-purpose Unix operating system development and migrate its System V.4 customers over to UnixWare – which it already offers as an alternative – and eventually to the 3DA technologies. It can add its specialist technologies, such as high availability, to the Santa Cruz Operation code. It’s got a dot release of its System V.4 set for next month that will start the ball rolling. The company will retain a niche development capacity for environments such as its massively parallel systems where it doesn’t expect Santa Cruz to play.
