SCO refreshes Unix line-up
Published: 16 Jun 2004 09:10 BST
The SCO Group unveiled a handful of new Unix products on Tuesday, a day after warning that its declining software business could be hurt by legal claims that Linux infringes on the company's intellectual property.
The company sells two versions of Unix -- UnixWare and the lower-end OpenServer -- but that business has been shrinking and has been overshadowed by SCO's ongoing legal battles with IBM and others.
SCO claims, among other things, that it owns the Unix copyrights, that Linux infringes those copyrights, and that IBM violated its Unix contract with SCO by moving Unix technology to Linux.
Among the products SCO announced on Tuesday were version 7.1.4 of its UnixWare software, accompanied by new editions for small businesses and for embedded devices such as slot machines; updates to calendar and email server software; authentication software to ease login troubles in mixed Unix-Windows environments; and an OpenServer overhaul called Legend, based on the UnixWare kernel and due out in the first quarter of 2005.
The Small Business Edition starts at $599 (£327) for a perpetual licence, SCO said. That compares to an annual list price of $349 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES Basic and $799 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES Standard. Red Hat said on Tuesday that its actual average RHEL price is $430 per year.
SCO's products are aimed chiefly at upgrades for the existing 2 million servers customers have installed, said Jeff Hunsacker, general manager of SCO's Unix division. "We look to that to help generate new revenues," he said.
New revenue has been hard to come by for the company. In its most recent quarter, revenue from Unix software products and service declined to $8.4m from $11.1m, during the same period last year. Service revenue dropped from $2m to $1.7m. SCO attributed the decline to competition from other operating systems, "particularly Linux," and to lowered computing spending.
The company's SCOsource effort, which includes its legal actions and its attempt -- largely unsuccessful so far -- to sell intellectual property licences to Linux users, could trigger more declines, SCO disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday.
"The decline in our Unix business revenue may be accelerated if industry partners withdraw their support as a result of our SCOsource initiatives and in particular any lawsuits against end users violating our intellectual property and contractual rights," SCO warned in the filing.
In an effort to make the Unix division profitable, SCO laid off 16 percent of its staff in the quarter ended 30 April, the company said in the filing. The number of employees in the division dropped from 329 on 30 April, 2003, to 263 on 30 April, 2004, SCO said in the filing.
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