Network Computing In Spotlight At SCO Forum

Electronic News, August 24, 1998 by Carolyn Whelan

"This year, SCO Forum shines a spotlight on network computing, which is rapidly changing the way organizations around the world do business. This new model enables businesses to integrate their current systems with emerging Internet technologies to get more from their investments than ever before," said Doug Michels, president and CEO of SCO.

Announcements made at the gathering reflect the infrastructure that SCO is building to penetrate the larger enterprise market. Among them was SCO's release of Unix software on an Intel box, which does the same as Unix on RISC platforms. Benefits include administration management, with the same storage and memory costs.

Also, SCO and Compaq Computer announced clustering software from Tandem, now a Compaq company -- UnixWare NonStop Clusters software -- for the enterprise server market. The software for Intel systems enables clustering for data availability, scalability or performance. Compaq said that the availability of the software will allow it to provide its customers in retail, financial services, Internet commerce and other industries access to cost-effective, scaleable and highly available systems.

Although the announcement is hardly new -- Compaq made its own announcement around six months ago -- it is significant.

"It's just about one of the most sophisticated and powerful clustering solutions," said Dan Kusnetzsky, an analyst at International Data Corp. (IDC), who also keynoted at the SCO Forum. "On top of UnixWare and NonStop, it looks like a single-system image." In January, Compaq introduced its NonStop Clusters technology on its ProLiant server-based Integrity XC Platform, a Unix platform for deploying revenue-generating services in telecommunications networks. The single-image system capability allows a cluster of servers to appear as one system, for simpler manageability and access.

According to Mr. Kusnetzsky, other vendors have announced what they call clustering. But, in fact, what they offer, instead, is availability and fail-over environments, which still need to be managed and programmed as separate systems.

Other notable announcements included the availability of EtherPage for the UnixWare 7. Etherpage, from Personal Productivity tools, allows users on a computer network to send messages to pagers. Version 3.0 of the system enables web-based administration, for users to configure their own systems through Web browsers and user-configurable HTML templates for customized interfaces.

Last week, Dialogic, too, said it was committed to supporting UnixWare 7 across SCO's entire line of high-density computer telephony components. The company's products support an array of multimedia resources including fax, speech recognition, text-to-speech, conferencing and station set interfaces.

At the forum, 1776 also launched an initiative encouraging the use of SCO-based "Integrated Communications Server" in small and medium-sized businesses for messaging, intranet, extranet and Internet Web server functions, fax server, file-and-print services, directory services, system management network back-up services and clustering. The company is recommending that small businesses with several servers dedicate one server to mission critical services and the other to business-critical communications and networking, using SCO software.

SCO has traditionally been a player in the smaller business market but, increasingly is focusing on the large enterprise. The company is looking beyond mission-critical functions to business-critical functions, those that have traditionally been handled by mainframes and software from IBM, including its OS390, OS400 and Netfinity software.

"Unix has traditionally been a distributed computing function," said Mr. Kusnetzsky. "It's taken a while for an Intel-based machine to be used as anything other than a toy."

In taking on business-critical functions, some issues still remain. Despite the inroads the company has already made into the enterprise space, a lot of work remains to be done to get into the enterprise caliber of machines to 64 bits, to support bigger file systems. Today, SCO only supports between 10 and 32 bits. But plans to take SCO support to much bigger systems, to the level beyond terabytes, are already under way.

Those messages are all well and good, but once again, SCO is preaching to the converted, and relying on its faithful to get the message out.

SCO is the dominant supplier of software for Intel servers, though few non-technologists know it. The company held 40.1 percent share of the application server platform market in terms of shipments last year in the small-to-medium business market, according to IDC. Furthermore, their software is widely embedded into other things, most of which is invisible to the end-user. That tactic has worked until now, but, as business people rather than technologists make decisions about which software to go for, SCO stands to suffer. Competing companies like Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft are much better at marketing their products. Executives need to be more aware of SCO in order to considering buying their offerings.