SCO: 'It's simple. We just do Unix.'
It resuscitates UnixWare by being good at being little--and by being focused
By Lisa Wirthman
It was only last December that SCO acquired UnixWare from Novell. Yet in the year's first half, SCO sold 26,500 units of the Unix OS--or 4,000 more units than Novell sold in all of 1995, according to International Data Corp. Not only that, but the little Santa Cruz, Calif., company has integrated UnixWare with the Internet
and has begun merging it with current SCO software.
And never mind that Gemini--the code name for the merger of UnixWare with SCO's OpenServer OS--isn't even due until mid-1997. SCO is already working with Hewlett-Packard on a next-generation 64-bit successor to ship in 1998.
It's just another case of how someone else's success has served to underscore Novell's failures. What was Novell doing wrong that SCO has gotten right? "It's simple," says Jeff Ait, SCO's vice president for the Internet. "We just do Unix." The broad lesson for everyone: Being big--and diverse--can be a curse. "SCO is Unix-only and software-only," explains Mary Hubley, an analyst at DataPro, in Delran, N.J. "Novell is into everything."
Under Novell, UnixWare just didn't sell. According to a DataPro 1995 worldwide survey of 1,300 users, only 6 percent were using UnixWare, vs. 34 percent for SCO's OpenServer. "UnixWare was lying around in waste at Novell," says DataPro's Hubley. "I thought UnixWare would die a slow death when Novell sold it."
Instead, it's enjoying a resurrection. Reason: Unlike Novell, "SCO has no ambivalence whatsoever" about UnixWare, says Philip Johnson, director of Unix server environments at IDC. And where there's a will, there's a way--to fast results. Less than a month after acquiring UnixWare, SCO CEO Alok Mohan issued the edict to integrate UnixWare and other SCO products with the Internet. Nineteen days later, SCO announced licensing agreements for a sweeping new family of
Internet products that would be available to customers in just four more months.
The channel has been another crucial factor in SCO's success. "Novell's biggest problem was a lack of ISV support that made it difficult to convince users to adopt UnixWare," says Ait. Concern about Novell's commitment to the product didn't help, either. But by April, SCO was announcing new OEM and ISV support for UnixWare, and just last month revealed that 66 of 100 ISVs it targeted have already signed up. "SCO really understands that market and how to
distribute through the channel," says Jean Bozman, IDC's Unix and server analyst.
In the end, SCO's success with UnixWare might be the result of simply being good at being little. "As a smaller company, they've always had to target a niche, which was Unix on Intel," Bozman said. "They focused on one area, built up the channel over the years and became the best at what they did."
PC Week Staff Writer Lisa Wirthman can be reached at lisa_wirthman@zd.com. |
