SCO Group Offers a Nice Ride for New Mobile Tech Ideas
By Bob Mims, The Salt Lake Tribune
Jun. 21–To succeed in the rapidly growing mobility software market, the SCO Group knows it needs an infusion of intellectual horsepower.
So, it made perfect sense Tuesday for the Lindon company to offer one of the finest super sports sedans made to the developer of the best application to power the firm’s foray into the rapidly evolving world of PDAs, smartphones, music and video players.
Research has shown “this is a market that already has more than 1 billion handsets [worldwide] and will be growing to about 2 billion in the next five years,” SCO President and CEO Darl McBride said. “It’s big now, and it’s only going to get bigger.”
To lure programmers to Las Vegas in March for the 20th annual SCO Forum, McBride is dangling a new V10, 507-horsepower BMW M5 automobile — or $100,000 cash. Those taking lessons in SCO’s foundational software development suite, EdgeBuilder SDK, also will be paid $1,000 bonuses and be eligible for other prizes.
SCO remains best known for its ongoing $5 billion federal lawsuit against IBM, in which the Lindon company claims its proprietary Unix code was illegally released into the freely distributed Linux operating system. It also is in the courts with Novell, RedHat and AutoZone over Linux rights issues.
But with its new focus on mobility software — and release of the critically acclaimed, but slow-off-the-shelves Open Server line — SCO has been striving to show it has more going for it than its hopes for an eventual courtroom payoff.
McBride put it this way: “While the legal team’s been off litigating, we’ve been busy on the business side innovating. We’re pretty excited about some of the things we’re coming out with in this new mobility space.”
Through Edgebuilder training, SCO hopes to recruit some of the best minds in programming to provide applications for Me Inc., the company’s new fixed and mobile network services platform. Among other applications, SCO hopes to increase fixed and mobile computing systems’ data sharing, multimedia features and speed of communication.
Al Gillen, an analyst with IDC Research, said SCO’s targeting of the mobile computing and communications sector is logical and fraught with challenges.
“The operating system [Windows, Linux, Unix, etc.] market is an increasingly difficult place to compete,” he said. “SCO Group really does need more diversity [and] these recent pushes represent significant diversification of their product portfolio.”
But can SCO truly leave its litigious reputation behind? With the 3-year-old IBM suit not expected to come to trial in Salt Lake City’s U.S. District Court until next February, that won’t be easy.
And, investors have not yet forgotten that SCO lost nearly $4.7 million during its most recent quarter, largely because of almost $3.8 million in additional costs related to its IBM lawsuit. (SCO stock closed Tuesday at $4.32 per share, unchanged from Monday).
“At some point here, you have to ask yourself whether or not branding these new [mobility] products under the SCO Group name is a good thing,” Gillen said.
The point has not escaped SCO executives, but they remain upbeat.
Sandy Guptka, chief technology officer and general manager for SCO’s platforms division, acknowledged that “this is clearly a big switch in paradigm.”
Among the many hurdles facing mobile technology software developers will be getting network firewalls, varying operating systems and differing network protocols to work together over desktop, laptop and handheld computers, PDAs, smartphones and other gadgets made by dozens of competing companies.
But the payoff for success, Guptka argues, is creation of a new “marketplace and channel for the creation, selling and distribution of mobile services and applications.”
SCO LOOKS FOR SUCCESS
–Lindon-based SCO has struggled but sees hope in expanding into the world of mobile computing and communications.
–SCO is offering incentives and prizes to lure developers for its August SCO Forum in Las Vegas.
–The market for handset devices is expected to double to 2 billion units in the next five years.
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