Unix benefits from "disappointing" Windows NT, claims SCO chief

There's been a general disappointment with Windows NT as an enterprise operating system and that's fuelled the market for Unix, according to Doug Michels, CEO of Unix vendor, SCO.

Speaking at the launch of this year's SCO Forum in California yesterday, Michels said: "The Unix market has a lot of health and a lot of growth despite rumours that it's going away."

In his keynote speech, he also credited Unix's growth to a move towards the Internet and network computing: "When Merced [64-bit computing] kicks in, that's when the Unix on Intel market will really kick off."

The company is planning to offer Linux support to its customers, despite the fact that Linux has often been seen as a direct Unix competitor. Michels told Silicon.com in a pre-Forum interview that Linux is fuelling the market for his company's product.

"Our experience is that eventually these open source things hit a level where customers want them expanded, extended, standardised and supported by a real, commercial software company," he said.

He added: "Linux has added a lot of excitement to Unix, brought in a lot of new people. Where a few years ago people in the universities might have been learning NT, now they're learning Linux, a form of Unix. They're going to go out and get jobs, and what do they know? They know how to work on a Unix platform."

"I feel better about the Unix market today than I've felt at any time in the last five years," he said.

Michels claimed that NT, although a "viable competitor", has failed to live up to enterprise expectations. The 35 million lines of code in Windows 2000 should keep Microsoft busy with testing for the next few years, he noted.

He concluded: "We feel comfortable that Unix is going to continue to be the standard of business computing at the high end, at the mission critical end, for a long time into the future."