IDG News Service
The SCO Group Inc. on Monday will attempt to shift the focus from its legal disputes with IBM Corp. and Red Hat Inc. by making a number of announcements relating to its SCOx Web services initiative.
Chief amongst these announcements will be a strategic alliance with Ericom Software Inc., whereby the two companies will combine Ericom’s PowerTerm Host Publisher with SCO’s new Web services integration software, called the SCOx Application Substrate, which will also be announced on Monday.
Billed by SCO as a foundation for building Web services into SCO’s UnixWare and OpenServer operating systems, the SCOx Application Substrate will include a variety of Web services application program interfaces (API) and a suite of development tools called the SCOx WebFace Solutions Suite.
The WebFace suite is based on software SCO acquired in its recent purchase of Vultus Inc.
The combination of Ericom’s Host Publisher, which is a development framework for Web-enabling data from a variety of legacy systems like the HP 3000, IBM mainframe, and Open VMS, with the SCOx Application Substrate is intended to provide an easy-to-use way for SCO resellers create a Web services interface to legacy applications, SCO officials said.
“We have 4,300 applications built on top of OpenServer and UnixWare that are found in dozens of different industry segments,” said SCO CEO Darl McBride. “But today, it’s a very black and white world. You’re either running hosted, or you’re running server-based (applications). Our goal is to erase that line of black and white and, from an application developer standpoint, make it so that it’s drop-dead easy to come in and build an application that takes advantage of a server-based system with the Internet.”
SCO will be giving away a software development kit that will allow users to write applications to the SCOx Application Substrate at its SCO Forum conference here in Las Vegas this week.
Also on Monday, SCO will release version 2.1 of its SCO Authentication for Microsoft Active Directory software and version 2.0 of its UnixWare Office Mail Server.
The Lindon, Utah, company will also announce a number of new partnerships, including one with accounting software maker Open Systems Inc., but the company declined to provide details on these announcements.
The SCO Forum runs through Tuesday.