December 10, 1996 5:30 PM ET
SCO preps for Internet strategy, product rollout
By Charles Cooper

Taking a page out of Microsoft Corp.'s playbook, SCO is gearing up for a series of announcements to prove that yes, it, too, is hard-core about the Internet. The company plans to bundle its ToolWare CD-ROM, which contains a suite of Internet and system management tools, with every copy of UnixWare, Internet FastStart and OpenServer. At the same time, the Santa Cruz, Calif., company also will formally take the wraps off Tarantella, a Unix server product that will allow a customer site's installed applications to run on a Java client. Tarantella is not going to evolve into a single product so much as it will turn into a series of technology releases throughout the course of next year that SCO will sell or license to customers. Tarantella will allow businesses to run applications on network computers and other Internet devices without rewriting their applications in Java, company officials said. "This will allow users to take any [current] applications and display them over the Web without changing a single line of code," said Gary Horning, the company's vice president of strategic marketing. Tarantella, which supports all Java-enabled clients and operates on client and Unix servers, is designed to cut administration costs to next to nothing, Horning added. Over the last few weeks, SCO officials have disclosed plans for an overarching strategic direction for 1997 that places the company four-square behind the Internet. The company is working to integrate Internet technologies into all levels of its products over the next 12 months. In a speech at InternetWorld later this week in New York, in fact, Tony Baines, SCO's director of strategic marketing, is expected to lay out details of the company's so-called Internet Way of Computing philosophy. "SCO is really inside lots of companies and into some big accounts, and these big accounts are satisfied," said Mary Hubley, an analyst with DataPro. "They're quiet and underlying, but they are there. I'm optimistic. SCO has always been a hidden factor." Copyright(c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company is prohibited. PC Week and the PC Week logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. PC Week Online and the PC Week Online logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. Send mail to PC Week