NEW YORK—The SCO Group Inc. is in the headlines more often for its legal battles than for its products these days. But last week, the software vendor wrapped up three years of development work and began shipping a major update of its Unix operating system.
The SCO OpenServer 6 software, code-named Legend, has been in beta-testing since last year and was originally scheduled to ship in this year’s first quarter. But its completion date slid a bit, a SCO spokesman acknowledged.
The update is intended to modernize OpenServer, which is aimed at small and midsize businesses. OpenServer 6 supports file sizes up to 1TB, increases memory support from 4GB to 64GB and adds an IP firewall filter and several other security features.
Performance enhancements were also a major focus during the development process, according to SCO. During a launch event held at Yankee Stadium here, company executives said their benchmark tests showed the new version running two to three times faster than the previous release, OpenServer 5.0.7. That’s partly because of the addition of support for multithreaded applications through the integration of the kernel from SCO’s separate UnixWare operating system.
Lindon, Utah-based SCO is fighting to stay relevant in the server operating system market. The company saw its annual revenue sink to $42.8 million in the fiscal year that ended in October, down 46% from the previous year.
Meanwhile, SCO’s highly publicized lawsuit against IBM, in which it is accusing that vendor of violating its Unix copyrights as part of Linux-related development work, is costing SCO millions of dollars each quarter. As of April 30, the company was down to $14.2 million in cash and liquid assets, having used $17.7 million over the prior six months.
But Stan Hubble, a technical specialist at Home Hardware Stores Ltd. who attended the OpenServer 6 announcement, said he’s unfazed by SCO’s financial and legal issues. Hubble works on development of a custom inventory management application used by about 350 of the St. Jacobs, Ontario-based retailer’s 1,100 independently operated stores in Canada. The 15-year-old application runs on OpenServer.
Hubble said Home Hardware’s store operators haven’t been clamoring for advances in the operating system but will likely appreciate the new version’s capabilities. He added that he expects upgrade decisions to be driven by hardware life cycles.
Deepak Thadani, president of Woodside, N.Y.-based SCO reseller SysIntegrators LLC, predicted strong demand for OpenServer 6 upgrades. “The large file system support is the big thing,” he said. “That was a real limitation on OpenServer 5.”
Thadani said he also thinks the new software will appeal to some Linux users who might achieve lower operating costs by migrating. Like Hubble, Thadani doesn’t consider SCO’s corporate issues to be a problem for users. “If I tell my customers, ‘This is the right way to go,’ they trust me,” he said.
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