SCO boss predicts Unix growth

Doug Michels, president and chief executive of Santa Cruz Operation, has dismissed rumours that the Unix market is in terminal decline and claimed there is evidence of growth in the sector.

At the SCO Forum user group meeting in Santa Cruz last week, Michels said analyst firm IDC expected the Unix-on-Intel sector to be the fastest growing area of the market, with growth rates of 10 per cent this year.

IDC also raised SCO's profit projection by $10bn to $37bn by 2003.

Michels added: "The Intel sector is starting to accelerate and Merced is a signal for the Unix-on-Intel market to blast off. Other developments in the Intel architecture, such as eight-way Pentium machines and clustering technology, will provide the potential disruption to proprietary Risc and mainframe systems."

This action would create more competition in the market, he claimed, and push SCO further into the enterprise: "In the past, we only got so far and then people moved to proprietary systems, but now we'll continue to go up."

Michels also claimed that Unix is doing so well because users are disappointed with Windows NT and its ability to be an enterprise server, as well as the widespread adoption of the network computing model.

Despite recent complaints from some Unix resellers that Unix' open source rival, Linux, was taking food from resellers' mouths, the freeware OS was cited as making Unix more visible in the market. The Year 2000 problem was also given as a factor in Unix growth.

Michels said: "A lot of people were in the wait-and-see mode, but now they have got to decide whether to change their systems or reinvest to make their old ones millennium-compliant. Many have recommitted to Unix."