SCO OpenServer takes heat

I did trek to sin city for the SCO Forum a couple of weeks ago. While we did talk about legal issues a little bit, there's not much happening on that front outside of an odd Novell filing a month ago.

What I did do in Vegas was to spend a couple of days talking to CEO Darl MacBride, Senior Vice President Chris Sontag, Senior Vice President Jeff Hunsaker, head of engineering (and newly minted CTO) Sandy Gupta, Chief Product Manager Erik Hughes and my favorite part of the company, the PR group led by Blake Stowell, ably assisted by Marc Modersitzki and Tia Henjy.

What everyone wanted to talk about was the recently released SCO OpenServer 6, the upcoming plans for the next version (dubbed Fusion) and a major announcement in the mobile arena due late September.

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I did trek to sin city for the SCO Forum a couple of weeks ago. While we did talk about legal issues a little bit, there's not much happening on that front outside of an odd Novell filing a month ago.

What I did do in Vegas was to spend a couple of days talking to CEO Darl MacBride, Senior Vice President Chris Sontag, Senior Vice President Jeff Hunsaker, head of engineering (and newly minted CTO) Sandy Gupta, Chief Product Manager Erik Hughes and my favorite part of the company, the PR group led by Blake Stowell, ably assisted by Marc Modersitzki and Tia Henjy.

What everyone wanted to talk about was the recently released SCO OpenServer 6, the upcoming plans for the next version (dubbed Fusion) and a major announcement in the mobile arena due late September.

OpenServer 6 is the latest incarnation of SCO's Unix host. I've watched it grow up since the days I tended a Xenix installation more than a dozen years ago. OpenServer 6 is by far the best host system SCO has ever turned out. It's a true rival to, and in many ways better than, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX or any other general purpose Unix installation. At the same time, it has to battle for space with SCO's own UnixWare 7 product. That's changing, though. Major steps have been taken to unify the code base for the two systems; hence, the Fusion project. The company hopes this will go into beta in about a year and ship toward the end of 2006 or perhaps the first quarter of 2007. Both Gupta and Hughes appeared confident that they could meet those targets.

I was also introduced to Tim Negris, who recently agreed to take on the job of senior vice president for marketing. In his long and varied career (he was Larry Ellison's head of marketing at Oracle), he spent a few years at IBM. I asked whether he had been involved in OS/2 marketing, and he said no. That's too bad, because OpenServer 6, UnixWare 7 and the upcoming Fusion remind me of nothing more than the late, lamented IBM operating system - outstanding quality that no one was interested in buying.

Tip of the Week

For an official copy of OS/2 Warp, act quickly. IBM is closing down the product two days before Christmas. Support is to continue until the end of 2006.

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