New Moon shines for Tarantella

Tarantella completes acquisition of rival vendor

Network computing vendor Tarantella has completed its acquisition of rival New Moon Systems.

It has also added support for enterprise products from Red Hat and SuSE, which was recently acquired by Novell, to its Enterprise 3 product.

Doug Michels, chief executive of Tarantella, said the addition of New Moon's Canaveral product to the company's range would help win new business.

By building on top of Windows Terminal Server, New Moon made for a cheaper solution than that of arch rival Citrix, he claimed. However, he avoided directly challenging Citrix.

"Terminal Server is good for remote administration, but not necessarily for running remote users," said Michels.

"It does 80 per cent out of the box, but Citrix provides you with 100 per cent of the solution. We are saying you can add the missing 20 per cent of the Terminal Server solution by adding Canaveral."

The latest version of Enterprise 3, Tarantella's heavyweight system, adds universal printing support, broader network compatibility and security improvements.

Chris Whiteley, product manager for enterprise applications at Clarity, one of Tarantella's distributors in the UK, said his company had been selling Canaveral for four or five months since the buy-out.

Clarity was expecting sales to reach the level of Tarantella's Enterprise product by the end of the year.

"Canaveral is a different sort of sale to Enterprise," said Whiteley. "It sits between Terminal Server and Citrix. We've found it sells best to SMEs, and has a much shorter sales cycle than Enterprise."

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