SCO stages its own Internet act
The Santa Cruz Operation announces a new technology that will allow any Java-enabled client to access mission-critical business applications running on Unix servers and mainframes.
The technology, known internally as Tarantella, will be embedded in SCO's Unix operating systems and licensed and sold to third parties for use in their applications. The technology can be viewed at SCO's Web site. It will be part of a series of announcements starting in mid-1997, according to SCO officials.
The announcement is indicative of a new Internet thrust for the company, according to according to Gary Horning, SCO's vice president of strategic marketing. The company is trying to shake off its image as a technology company and drive its marketing efforts into new accounts implementing Internet technologies.
Tarantella enables the new wave of Java-enabled devices, such as network computers, to run applications without developers having to add a single line of code, said Horning. "It's pragmatic," added Tony Baines, director of strategic marketing. "It's saying 'the world is going to be a more diverse place.'"
Tarantella combines existing SCO technology found in its emulation software packages with SCO's Advanced Adaptive Protocols to insure access to every client by way of the server-based Tarantella software layer. Implementations of Tarantella will address the costs of administration through the delivery of applications from the central server, a method similar to the network-computer approach being championed by Sun Microsystems and Oracle.
"This is technology, not product," noted Dan Kusnetsky, director of Unix and client-server environments at International Data Corporation. "The bottom line is SCO is a very pervasive vendor, but nobody knows it."
SCO also announced its intentions to include its ToolWare CD-ROM of Internet and systems management-related utilities with every version of its UnixWare, OpenServer, and Internet FastStart server platforms. A preview of SCO's next-generation Gemini volume Unix server operating system platform is also included on the CD. Gemini is the code name for a joint SCO-Hewlett-Packard effort to bring a common source code base to the Unix market that developers can write to, thereby minimizing platform ports.