SANTA CRUZ OPERATION (SCOC)- from breifing.com
Santa Cruz Operation is the dominant operating system in the SME (small to midsized enterprise) market. Typically, a final solution is sold by a VAR (value added reseller) to the business customer using an Intel based PC server and SCO Unix. Over the years, SCO has held a dominant position for years, with a 82% market share.
However, SCO's revenue growth stalled over the past year or so, and the company is looking to move their product higher up the food chain. In other words, larger enterprises. To capture this market, they recently joined forces with Intel and IBM to standardize UNIX on UnixWare 7, which will be SCO Unix, enhanced with portions of AIX, IBM's Unix.
SCO believes that Intel processors have finally equalled RISC processors commonly used in larger enterprises. As the Intel processors have gotten faster, they are becoming more accepted. MERCED, the coming 64-bit Intel processor, will further this market shift. SCO's UnixWare 7 is designed to enter that market.
But most fascinating of all was SCO's description of their new product, called Tarantella. Virtually unknown to any analyst in the room, the description of this product as an "application broker" is almost mind-blowing. It sits in between client PC's and a variety of legacy and existing applications, and delivers all applications to the client through a browser interface. By interacting directly with legacy and existing client-server
applications, Tarantella "translates" interactions with the server into Java based format. The Java code is then loaded to the client browser, where it looks like the client is running the original server application. If the description sounds amazing, it is.
The value of Tarantella is that suddenly you would have a single interface for all existing disparate applications. Customers express disbelief at first, leading to a 6 month trial period. Analysts seemed to be somewhat baffled by the description of the product, in fact, we shared in the initial disbelief. Tarantella could become a standard interface uniting Web applications, legacy apps, and client-server apps, presenting all of them
on a client browser. It seems odd that SCO hasn't promoted it more strongly. Revenue from Tarantella is minimal, but they have 40 engineers, 20 marketing staff, and 12 salesmen on the project.
The Intel/IBM development is definitely good for SCO. IBM has committed to spending "tens of millions" encouraging ISVs to port their applications to the new platform. Although forcing dollars into the channel doesn't guarantee sales, at least it isn't coming out of SCO pockets.
Repeated questions about details of finances showed that some analysts are very interested in SCO. The stock has been beaten down over the past year, the IBM deal has clearly renewed interest in the company. But we want to learn more about Tarantella.
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taken from the SCOC yahoo, one of the better boards over there.
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