SCO looks beyond existing partners
Software vendor moves towards higher end of channel with Tarantella drive.
Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) will open up its high-end Tarantella product to distribution partners in January, but few resellers will be recruited from within its channel.
SCO is pitching Tarantella, which allows legacy applications to be accessed from a variety of browser based clients, at 1,000 seat customers. This would automatically exclude the majority of UnixWare and OpenServer resellers that are focused on the SME market.
Jonathon Ellis, sales and marketing director of SCO sub-distributor Open Computing, claimed: "SCO/Intel resellers are not ready for Tarantella yet. There are only two or three that are in existence today and we will need to recruit some more."
Tarantella is currently not available to SCO's four distributors - Sphinx CST, Ilion, Open Computing and UniDirect - and is sold direct into large accounts and resellers such as Morse and Deloitte.
But SCO reseller CPiO believes the market for Tarantella is wider than the vendor has anticipated. Alan Cobbald, technical director of CPiO, said the cost structure of Tarantella makes it economical to target customers with as few as 200 users. He plans to use the product to offer application hosting services to smaller customers.
Cobbald claimed lack of technical expertise will not be a barrier to smaller resellers. CPiO has been trained on Tarantella, although it is awaiting certification.
Tarantella is available for applications on UnixWare, Solaris and HP-UX platforms and supports clients including NCD, Wyse and IBM Netstation.
It does not yet directly support Windows applications or client devices such as phones or PDAs.
Barry Walker, regional director of SCO UK and Ireland, expects the Tarantella scheme, together with other initiatives, to increase its channel by 15 per cent.
Other measures include the reselling of Linux services through the channel (PC Dealer, 25 August), and creating SCO accounts by hitch-hiking on Compaq and IBM recruitment drives.