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To: miklosh who wrote (24227)11/7/1998 4:32:00 PM
From: joe  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 45548
 


OT, miklosh, sorry, you're right. That's the
Press Release I meant. Doesn't look like IBM will
own SCO.

Still, IBM will have a lot of say now in SCO, and they
will be pushing it strongly, IMO. The most important
point is that IBM is putting some muscle behind it. How
much is a good question, but suspect quite a bit. I will have to
bone up on it some more. If you have any info on this,
please let me know.

Thanks, joe



To: miklosh who wrote (24227)11/11/1998 11:12:00 PM
From: joe  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 45548
 


*OT*

miklosh, ran into this. thought you'd be interested.
UNIX forces may be forced to do something they've never
been able to do on their own - work together. May
hold up Gates a a year or two from being US Richest man
ever...enough to MSFT on its toes a bit.

...Good news for Steve,...this way he won't have to fix
as many NT Servers breaking down :-)


SANTA CRUZ OPERATION (SCOC)

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.