Corel/GraphOn Cross-Platform Interoperability Suite To Ship in Six Months - to compete with Tarantella
For more about GraphOn/UFAC see Subject 24377
From Client Server News, Mon Jan 11, 99
The cross-platform interoperability software that evolves out of the surprise pre-Christmas tie-up between Corel and Citrix wannabe GraphOn will be packaged as a suite of interrelated products, GraphOn says. Commercial rollout is expected in the next six months, although GraphOn and Corel engineers were huddling last week trying to bring some exactitude to the schedule.
It's possible the suite will be called Go-Anywhere and that the moniker jBridge, the name of the Corel product GraphOn traded a fourth of its equity for, will be dropped, another point GraphOn isn't absolutely positive about yet. It may decide to sell jBridge and its own homegrown technologies standalone as well as combined in the suite and in that case might keep the jBridge name even though the "j," which stands for Java, won't be apt anymore.
GraphOn anticipates beating the timetable Corel foresaw for jBridge (neé Remagen) by bringing together building blocks already developed for jBridge and GraphOn's series of three existing "Go" products. The Go line, consisting of Go-Between, Go-Global and Go-Joe, enable Unix and Linux apps to run on any desktop using GraphOn's proprietary thin-wire RapidX protocol.
JBridge, on the other hand, as developed by Corel, delivers 32-bit Windows apps from an NT server to any client running a Java virtual machine. GraphOn intends to replace the JVM requirement with RapidX to give the jBridge technology more universality and will probably field only jBridge's server segment, substituting its own clients.
Instead of the "two-phase" rollout initially anticipated by Corel for jBridge - which is now roughly 80% finished - GraphOn will go straight to commercial launch of the product that will supplant jBridge. GraphOn says the phase-one jBridge has performance issues. Otherwise, most of the work still to be finished is a matter of debugging the stuff.
The putative Go-Anywhere suite is viewed internally by the companies as competing against Citrix' WinFrame, and to a lesser extent against SCO's Tarantella. Its parts will be interoperable. "You can have one talk to any other," an executive elaborated.
As previously reported in a CSN news flash, GraphOn and Corel are billing their planned product offering as able to link "any server platform to any client platform," hence the Go-Anywhere name, underscoring a facility Citrix doesn't have.
Under the deal between the companies that was unveiled a week before Christmas, Corel takes a 25% stake in GraphOn. Besides jBridge, GraphOn gets Corel's facility in New Hampshire plus the 10 jBridge staffers there. GraphOn also announced intentions to go public by backing into New York-based Unity First Acquisition Corporation. Unity First, which is already traded over the counter, is supposed to acquire GraphOn in exchange for 6.79 million shares, and change its name to GraphOn Corporation. When all that's done, Unity stockholders will own 20% of GraphOn, Corel stockholders another 20% and GraphOn's current stockholders 60%, according to GraphOn president Walt Keller. Keller described First Unity as a "blank check company, with $6.5 million in capital and no employees."
GraphOn is also in the process of closing a $5 million private placement from New York-based Spencer Trask Securities, essentially a network of angels, it said. Reportedly the placement was oversubscribed. GraphOn will capture another $20 million by issuing warrants associated with the Unity First initial IPO giving it a total of $31 million in capital by the time the new GraphOn is functioning. "The value of the company will then be determined by the price of the stock," Keller said.
The idea is to build a company the size of Citrix which hit a market cap of $4 billion last week. GraphOn claims to be "amazed" at the caliber of prospect coming forward since it made the jBridge announcement last month. It's not like the Unix market, GraphOn sales and marketing VP Robin Ford said, "this stuff has got sex appeal."
Michael Cowpland, Corel's president and CEO, said the deal should not be seen as Corel abandoning either Java or "thin client computing." Instead, according to Corel, the pact "endorses" Java, and "accelerates" thin client development, while "letting both companies focus on their expertise."
Corel, which failed to produce a vaunted Java Office suite to run on NCs the year before last, has of course been abandoning all but its core technologies, WordPerfect and Corel Draw, as it struggles to right itself. It's rebounded to $4-$5 from a nadir of a buck a share in August.
"We [still] have some ongoing Java efforts," Cowpland claimed. Repeating what he said about Java's limitations when his Java productivity suite went down the proverbial tubes, he said, Java "has not emerged on the desktop [in] the way advertised by Sun," although "it does have uses" on the server side.
Corel focused its Java activities on jBridge after the so-called JSuite was shelved with the intention of taking on Citrix (CSN No 215).
Corel is still officially at work on OpenJ - the spoiled project formerly known as JSuite - and is utilizing "bits and pieces" of it in other products. But Corel is "not really interested in a Java version of WordPerfect," it reiterated.
The future 9.0 editions of both WordPerfect and Corel Draw - now in beta - are focusing fashionably on web technology, reporters were told during the GraphOn teleconference. In addition, Corel of course is planning Linux editions of WordPerfect, Corel Draw and - through its subsidiary - NetWinder NC hardware.
Corel anticipates shipping both WordPerfect and Corel Draw for Linux later this year. A 15-day trial version of WordPerfect 7.0 for Linux is now available for free download from the Corel web site. Meanwhile, Corel is helping with Wine, the decade-long exercise to build a Windows emulator that would sit on top of any Unix running on an x86 CPU that has so far failed to get anywhere. Corel's interest in Wine springs from its Linux ambitions.
Other vendors are supposed to be pleased over the Corel/GraphOn pact - including anti-Microsoft notables Sun, IBM and Sybase, Keller said during the teleconference. Sybase is the only company to have contracted to use jBridge and is integrating it with PowerBuilder to make PowerBuilder multiuser and web-enabled. Sun and IBM have already licensed GraphOn's existing software for distribution with their respective Java NCs and Unix computers. That means that a layer of Go technology goes out with every copy of AIX and Solaris, an opportunity GraphOn is starting to exploit.
GraphOn's Go-Joe allows Unix applications to be accessed from Java-enabled desktops, while Go-Between gives Unix access to the multiuser Windows NT environment. Go-Global connects Windows clients to Unix without needing an X server. GraphOn has already ported the trio to Linux.
The GraphOn contingent aptly refers to Citrix WinFrame as "Microsoft's own product." The Windows Terminal Server (WTS) was of course built out of technology licensed by Microsoft from Citrix. Last year, GraphOn was supposed to be acquired by Prologue Software, the competitor to Citrix in producing multiuser NT software for Microsoft - but then, the GraphOn/Prologue deal fell through. GraphOn last month attributed the Prologue annulment to Microsoft's decision to acquire the Prologue technology although it took them a while to figure out that the basis of their relationship was gone. Ford said they were going to do a "Corel-like thing" together and that GraphOn was urged to it by Sun.
Because Microsoft's technology is essentially Citrix', vendors such as Sybase are said to be happy about the new Corel/GraphOn plans because they "would prefer to have a little less Microsoft influence in their future." |
