The Agenda Setters: SCO chief Michels on the Microsoft battle

It's not everyone who can survive an attack from Microsoft, but this week's Agenda Setter, Doug Michels, fought back against Windows NT by creating an entirely new market.

Michels took on the job of CEO, when SCO was a small-scale Unix developer owned by his father. He decided to push its brand of Unix up to the high-end, where it is now the market-leading supplier.

In a video interview with Silicon.com, Michels said this was a market Microsoft wouldn't be able to enter for five to ten years.

"More and more we talk to IT directors and CIOs around the world, and whereas before they were seriously considering Windows NT as a future enterprise platform, they're now saying 'No - not for a while - a long while." He added that the extra thirty-five million lines of source code in Windows 2000 have not won the trust of IT managers.

Michels said new chip technologies were the key enabler in getting Unix into the enterprise market. In particular 8-way multiprocessors and huge memory capabilities helped its rise to the high-end.

"On Intel hardware, we just didn't historically have the capability or capacity to go for the really big mission critical, data centre kind of systems. But if you look at what's happened with Intel hardware over the last few years... these look like mainframes... we want to make sure that our software is in that league."