NT vs. Unix vs. Unix - Unix standard unlikely, vendors seek Intel-based market share - Industry Trend or Event - Brief Article

Software Magazine, Oct, 1997 by Lana Gates

The goal of a single Unix platform appears increasingly unlikely as Unix vendors escalate their market warfare in pursuit of customers and partners. With users still questioning Windows NT reliability, the release of enterprise products based on Intel's x 86 chips has sparked a fight to determine which Unix environments will dominate on Intel servers.

The SantaCruz Operation (SCO) is leading the pack with 80% of the Unix server market on Intel, and 35% of the overall Unix server market, but it's under attack from Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, which each hold between 12% and 16% of the market with proprietary RISC chips.

Intel promised to support SCO Unix as the Intel standard, but now plans to support as much software as possible on the platform. Sun CEO Scott McNealy has vowed that when the dust settles, Solaris and NT will be the only operating systems left standing. Counters SCO President and CEO Alok Mohan, "We're driving for scalability, performance, reliability, and availability and there's nobody who can compete against us on the Intel platform."

SCO is struggling, However, to reshape Its identity against Sun and Microsoft's marketing muscle, says IDC's Dan Kusnetzky. "SCO is everywhere and no one knows it," he says. SCO has succeeded in luring enterprise customers such as Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc., which is retrofitting 300 restaurants with point-of-sale software compatible with SCO Unix servers.

Mohan says his company is reinforcing its image by narrowing its target market to transaction-based, mission critical environments and unveiling its Tarantella server product. "Tarantella would allow me to bring all of my applications to one central place and control them and not invest a lot of money in rewriting those applications," says Michael Mullins, Cracker Barrel's director of enterprise operations.

SCO is also preparing to ship Gemini, its next-generation Unix kernel, which supports native Java and integrates the UnixWare and OpenServer OSs. Gemini may give customers another reason to think twice before going to NT servers. "U nix will survive because it meets a need," says Claude Wimberly, director of enterprise marketing for Intel. "Gemini helps ensure Unix's continued success."