SCO: Driven by customers

At 2,282 units in 2002, the SCO Group has bagged a 5 percent share of the total server market in India, pegged at 45,640 units. Skoch also believes that the SCO Group is well positioned to double its market share in three years or earlier.

Recently, the company was once again renamed SCO. It was earlier known as Caldera. This move is primarily aimed at leveraging the SCO brand equity. Comments Srikant Acharya, country director, India & South-East Asia, SCO, “Instead of investing a lot of money in establishing the Caldera brand, it was decided to continue with the SCO name, which has its own brand value.” Most customers and partners were also in favour of continuing with the SCO name.

Last year was a year of consolidation at SCO. Although revenue-wise the company did not meet expectations, it managed to keep its expenses down. The company has also consolidated its presence in all the market segments it operates in. In the last fiscal, SCO created a new division—SCO Source, responsible for the IPRs that SCO holds. Apart from this, it launched its new messaging server called SCO Mail Server and management product called SCO Manager. In the days to come, the company will be focusing more on security and other applications.

Srikant Acharya

UNIX constitutes a major portion of SCO’s revenues and most of their customers or partners have put their faith in the company’s UNIX technology and strategy.

SCO’s Linux initiative started with the launch of United Linux last November. And subsequent to that SCO introduced SCO Linux, which is powered by United Linux. Acharya explains that this was the first Linux distribution out of the entire United Linux consortium to be launched worldwide. However, in future the company will continue to focus on both UNIX and Linux.

According to Acharya, around 2 percent of desktops across the world run on Linux. This shows that the market share of Linux in the desktop is not that significant. However, SCO firmly believes that this market will grow. Acharya further adds that right now on the server side Linux is a formidable threat to the competition and expects that the server market for Linux will grow at a rapid pace. “If you consider the usage of Linux as a back-office server in areas like file and print, Web services, Internet/intranet and security, Linux has got the technology as well as the price advantage.” And probably because of this perception the company has come out with some enterprise products and applications (certified on SCO Linux) targeted at this enterprise space. In the past, enterprise customers faced a lot of difficulties because of inadequate support services. But with the presence of two of the biggest Linux players—Redhat and SCO—it is hoped that support for Linux will no more be an issue for enterprise customers.

UNIX is considered to be one of the popular OS options in India. Acharya says that India is a typical market, where a number of customers are emotionally in favor of UNIX. He also expects that all their existing UNIX customers would like to continue with UNIX. And, to cater to all these existing customers they have a range of UNIX products. However, some of the new customers of SCO are also looking at Linux in a very big way. And, for all these new customers who are looking at Linux deployment, SCO has a range of Linux products as well. Added to this, SCO Linux is now certified by Oracle 9i. And very shortly, Oracle 9i-application server and Oracle applications are going to be certified by SCO Linux. India being a huge Oracle market, a tremendous amount of synergy exists between SCO and Oracle. Apart from this, some other products of SCO are also certified on HP hardware. SCO also has a joint market development programme with HP and Computer Associates. And, all these partners—Oracle, HP and CA have a very strong presence in India and this synergy will drive the growth of SCO’s OS business in India. However, in the days to come, depending on customer requirements, SCO will continue to focus both on UNIX and Linux.

— Gaurav Patra