Tarantella Beefs Up Offerings To Win Share From Citrix

The move follows Tarantella's acquisition earlier this month of New Moon Systems, another Citrix competitor. The acquisition broadens Tarantella's product line and stands to open new sales opportunities for the channel, solution providers said.

"[Tarantella] came from a Unix platform background, so this [acquisition] will put them more in the mainstream," said Dan Merry, president of Open Technologies, a solution provider based in Des Moines, Iowa.

The new software release, expected to be dubbed Tarantella Enterprise 4, will add support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and leverage upgrades to Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), which add full color, sound and local resource availability to a Terminal Services environment, said Doug Michels, CEO of Santa Cruz-based Tarantella.

Citrix offers similar features through its proprietary Independent Computing Architecture protocol.

"Whatever advantages Citrix had before,because they weren't limited by the same [protocol] restrictions,all of those advantages have been taken away now," Michels said.

The Enterprise upgrade, scheduled for release next quarter, also will add improved support for integration to third-party portal products from vendors such as Sun Microsystems and Plumtree Software, he said.

Tarantella's Enterprise software runs on Unix and Linux servers, providing access to Unix, Linux, mainframe, AS/400 and Windows Terminal Server applications. New Moon's Canaveral iQ product line runs on Windows servers and delivers Windows applications.

Though the two product lines will remain separate, Tarantella aims to integrate the platforms and bolster each line with features from the other, Michels said.

For example, Canaveral iQ already includes a universal printing solution, which Michels said has been on Tarantella's road map for "a long time."

Canaveral iQ 2.0, which New Moon announced before the acquisition, is scheduled to ship by the end of this month. It adds support for Windows Server 2003 as well as features to improve manageability, usability and security.