SCO to push Web services with Ericom alliance

IDG News Service - LAS VEGAS -- The SCO Group Inc. today will attempt to shift the focus from its legal disputes with IBM and Red Hat Inc. by making a number of announcements relating to its SCOx Web services initiative. Chief among them will be the announcement of a strategic alliance with Closter, N.J.-based Ericom Software Inc., in which the two companies will combine Ericom's PowerTerm Host Publisher with SCO's new Web services integration software, called the SCOx Application Substrate.
Billed by SCO as a foundation for building Web services into SCO's UnixWare and OpenServer operating systems, the SCOx Application Substrate will include a variety of Web services APIs and a suite of development tools called the SCOx WebFace Solutions Suite.
The WebFace suite is based on software that SCO acquired in its recent purchase of Vultus Inc.
The combination of Ericom's Host Publisher, a development framework for Web-enabling data from a variety of systems, with the SCOx Application Substrate is intended to provide an easy-to-use way for SCO resellers to create a Web services interface to existing applications, SCO officials said.
"We have 4,300 applications built on top of OpenServer and UnixWare that are found in dozens of different industry segments," said SCO CEO Darl McBride. "But today, it's a very black-and-white world. You're either running hosted, or you're running server-based [applications]. Our goal is to erase that line of black and white and, from an application developer standpoint, make it so that it's drop-dead easy to come in and build an application that takes advantage of a server-based system with the Internet."
SCO will be giving away a software development kit that will allow users to write applications to the SCOx Application Substrate at its SCO Forum conference here this week.
Also today, SCO will release Version 2.1 of SCO Authentication for Microsoft Active Directory software and Version 2.0 of UnixWare Office Mail Server.
The Lindon, Utah, company will also announce a number of new partnerships, including one with accounting software maker Open Systems Inc., but the company declined to provide details on those announcements.