Unix has now officially moved out of the general computer space and into the telco space at Tandem Computers Inc, according to chief executive Roel Pieper, speaking at the European launch of the company’s Object Relational Data Mining strategy meeting in Amsterdam. NetWare is now in rapid decline as an applications platform and has been replaced by Windows NT on Intel said Pieper, who was once chief executive of Unix System Labs, the AT&T spin-off that was responsible for Unix technology and marketing before it was acquired by Novell Inc in 1993. The reason we sold USL to Novell was to stop that happening. It obviously failed, he said. The Unix-based Integrity S Series was once seen as the successor to Tandem’s proprietary NonStop Himalaya boxes, although the company always had it doubts about the suitability of Unix for systems with high levels of reliability. They will now be marketed only to telecommunications customers, a traditional Unix stronghold, leaving retail, finance and general enterprise systems business to the Himalayas at the high-end, and NT at the lower-end. Himalaya systems have not faded away as quickly as was once predicted, and indeed, have spawned the two technologies on which Tandem is now betting its future: namely ServerNet clustering and the ServerWare database. (ServerWare is the new name for Tandem’s Nonstop SQL database technology used on the Himalaya systems). Major growth at Tandem is focused on NT systems, with Himalaya still very much alive according to Pieper. With its core technologies also available on NT, the future of Himalaya can now be seen in a much brighter light he said. Announcements about its repositioned Unix systems will be made within the next few months, he said, when the systems would be aligned with some of the same philosophy and technology as the Himalaya and NT machines. They already support ServerNet and will support ServerWare. The first release of ServerWare on NT is expected during the third quarter of this year.
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