Linux shops needing to access their legacy apps on the fly may want to consider a joint offering from The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and Caldera Systems.
Caldera has announced it will bundle Tarantella, SCO's middleware product, with its own OpenLinux Application Server. Tarantella sits on a server and lets clients access back-end host applications, almost regardless of what platforms are involved. Users with Java-enabled browsers can access programs running on Windows NT Terminal Server, most variants of Unix, OS/390, OS/400 and Java.
SCO has been making unsteady steps of late, stating it was going to roll out its own Linux distribution, then postponing it. The company has refused to say why the rollout is delayed. This has also, suggest some analysts, cast doubt on the fate of Monterey, SCO's joint project with IBM to create a 64-bit Unix variant for the Intel platform.
Over the past year, SCO has been facing stiff competition in the low end of the Unix market from both Windows NT and Linux, and recently split into three different divisions to see if it could start to regain some market share. One division includes the Unix products, another handles Tarantella, and the third handles services and Linux.