pc week's comments and press conference picks
02.24.98 6:15 pm ET
SCO Inc. (SCO) has enlisted the financial help of
several OEM partners to accelerate development
of its UnixWare operating system for Intel Corp.'s
Merced platform.
Earlier today, SCO announced it will receive
unspecified amounts of money from Compaq Computer Corp., Data General
Corp., ICL and Unisys Corp. to help fund research and development of SCO's
64-bit UnixWare for servers based on Intel's IA-64 architecture.
In addition to the cash investments, each of the partners will contribute
unspecified technology to help fortify the operating system with more high-end
features, such as ccNUMA capabilities and support for 32-way processing.
The idea, according to SCO officials, is to create a version of UnixWare that can
supplant more expensive, proprietary RISC-based servers and even
mainframes in corporate data centers. More important, however, is SCO's
ambitious strategy to make UnixWare the de facto standard Unix operating
system for Merced. At this morning's press conference in Santa Cruz, Calif.,
each of SCO's partners pledged to offer UnixWare as its primary operating
system for 64-bit computing.
"RISC vendors will find it increasingly difficult to stay competitive" as Intel-based
systems-particularly Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT-grow more robust, said Alec
Mohan, SCO's president and CEO.
However, whether partners such as Compaq-which recently acquired Digital
Equipment Corp. and, before that, Tandem Computers Inc.-will phase out
existing Unix operating systems in favor of UnixWare is unclear.
An Intel spokesman at the conference was neutral in describing the chip
maker's relationship with SCO, saying Intel will make it a priority to ensure that
all operating systems run successfully on Merced when it ships in the year
2000 time frame.
SCO's Mohan stressed that his company holds the largest share of the
Unix-on-Intel market, which puts UnixWare in the best position to become the
standard for data center computing.
According to researcher International Data Corp., of Framingham, Mass., SCO
currently claims more than 40 percent of the worldwide Unix server market,
compared with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s 22 percent.
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