SCO Unveils SCOx Web Services Components, Enhanced E-Mail Server

At SCO Forum 2003, SCO announced the delivery of key component of its SCOx Web services initiative--SCOx WebFace Solution Suite 4.0--as well as the SCOsms Web Services API and SCObiz Web Services APIs.

The company's SCOx direction and Web services API plans were unveiled last April.

The enhanced suite and new APIs, designed to enable partners and customers to migrate legacy Unix applications to a services-oriented architecture, consists of the WebFace Browser Application Platform and WebFace Studio development platform.

SCO's Web services architecture is based on Web services standards including XML, SOAP and UDDI. The SCOx technologies announced at the annual partner conference are key to SCOx Application Substrate, which includes the suite, APIs and, in the future, Web services security and encapsulation technologies, executives said.

SCO also announced a partnership with Closter, N.J.-based Ericom Software to help partners and developers integrate legacy software applications. The combination of SCOx WebFace and Ericom Host Publisher will enable customers to securely bring legacy system information to a Web services environment. The suite will also enable partners and developers to create and deploy applications from a Web application interface on both SCO Unix and non-SCO Unix operating systems.

And that's not all.

SCO also announced at the start of the show Monday the availability of UnixWare Office Mail Server 2.0 and the SCO Authentication 2.1 for Microsoft Active Directory.

The enhanced e-mail server, which is now bundled with the UnixWare operating system, is aimed at small and midsize businesses and offers a new version of Office Mail Connector for Microsoft Outlook, support for POP3 and IMAP, and an LDAP-based Internet address book.

The enhanced authentication solution, SCO Authentication 2.1, offers improved security and scalability; support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, OpenServer 5.0.6 and 5.0.7 and SCO UnixWare 7.1.1 and 7.1.3; and automatic failover to a backup domain controller. The SCO Authentication solution, which offers Kerberos encryption for user credentials that are central to Unix and Windows administration, allows for the management of a single user account across a mixed Unix and Windows environment.

During his Monday morning keynote, SCO CEO Darl McBride spent much of his time defending SCO's intellectual property battle with IBM as a way to protect the assets of his company and the intellectual property of partners.

Over the next year, SCO will continue to build on its Unix property and will reinvest in operating systems, roll out SCOx Web services components, aggressively defend SCO's Unix IP and extend more business opportunities to partners, McBride said.

SCO isn't going out of business and is committed to following through on a key promise as part of its SCObiz partner incentive rolled out last year--to help solution providers make money from their value-added Unix solutions, he said.

SCO, which once had 16,000 resellers, now counts 11,000 resellers and solution providers, according to a statement released by the company.

"We want to create new business opportunities for partners," said McBride, adding that the company's intellectual property battle with IBM is aimed at protecting partners' margins as well. "We're creating a new set of business opportunities on how you go to market and make money," he said. "We'll create new business opportunities for partners. There's a fight going on and we're fighting for us and for you."