The series of announcements from SCO, beginning with its purchase of UnixWare from Novell last fall and including the joint-agreement announcement with Hewlett-Packard at UniForum '96 to develop Unix for a 64-bit processor architecture, continued with a press briefing in San Francisco on Apr. 23. At that meeting, Alok Mohan, SCO president and CEO, introduced senior officers from Data General, ICL, NCR, and Unisys, as well as others on videotape, each of whom spoke about their company's decision to commit to SCO UnixWare as a standard, high-volume Unix operating system based on Intel processors.
Mohan stressed that the announcement signaled real progress towards his goal of a collaborative process that preserves innovation. This innovation, he said, will come from the work that manufacturers will do to provide value-added features. At the same time, independent software vendors (ISVs) will have fewer ports with which to contend. Mohan said he expects this to result in many more applications being developed for the Unix platform. A number of industry-leading ISVs were at the meeting to lend their endorsement, including Acucobol, BEA, Computer Associates, Information Builders, Informix, Netscape Communications, Oracle, Platinum Technologies, SAS Institute and SAP.
An SCO technical white paper, "SCO UnixWare 2.1, Enabling the Enterprise" is available on the Web at http://www.sco.com.