Using International Data Corp figures to bolster its claim that it really is the only visible player in the Unix-on-iAPX-86 market, Santa Cruz Operation Inc last week cemented its expanding relationship with AT&T Global Information Solutions, signing a worldwide marketing, support and technology exchange agreement with the former NCR Corp. AT&T has sold some 20,000-odd Santa Cruz-based servers since 1992 and Santa Cruz believes its OpenServer Unix products will now be offered as AT&T Global’s standard system for small and medium sized business. Santa Cruz has licensed AT&T’s Disk Array Plus RAID 5 software for use in future products and is apparently eyeing other kinds of gateway technology too. AT&T Global, already a Santa Cruz partner of sorts, was particularly keen on Santa Cruz’s Internet bundle, we hear. It will now become the largest OEM customer for Santa Cruz subsidiary IXI Ltd’s Win-tif technology – it already takes X.desktop. Santa Cruz’s favourite IDC charts show it holding 33% of the worldwide Unix server market, with AIX at 8%, HP-UX 5%, UnixWare 2%, Solaris 1%, NeXTstep 1% and others – about 30 firms with less than 1% including AT&T Global, Unisys Corp, Digital Equipment Corp, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, ICL Plc, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, Groupe Bull, Hitachi Ltd, Sony Corp – at 48%. Its plan is to work for the signatures of the 48%. According to its figures it outsells UnixWare on iAPX-86 by 15 to 1 and NeXTstep by 153 to 1; Solaris by 10 to 1, HP-UX by 6 to 1 and AIX by 4 to 1. The IDC figures show it with 91% of the Unix servers and hosts shipped on iAPX-86 boxes. Against ships of other advanced operating systems defined by IDC as typically 32-bit, portable, multi-tasking, unbundled and multiprocessing, Santa Cruz shows at 14% against NetWare with 44%, other Unixes with 21%, OS/2 8%, AIX 4%, NT 4%, HP-UX 2%, Solaris 1%, and UnixWare and NeXTstep less than 1%. Unix server and host ships totalled 468,000 last year IDC says, with NetWare at 476,000, OS/2 90,000 and NT server 40,000. It predicts 380,000 Unix host system software ships this year – 186,000 servers – 52,500 NT server ships and 561,000 NetWare 3.x server ships. It reckons that will rise to 420,000 and 261,000; 90,000 and 595,000 respectively by next year and 510,000 and 392,000; 260,000 and 612,000 by 1997. IDC’s six-month outlook has Santa Cruz holding a current solid position in small hosts, future vulnerability; NT momentum slowed, Chicago positioning issues; NetWare relatively strong momentum; UnixWare big disappointment, positioning problems with NetWare; IBM potential OS/2, AIX confusion with Workplace OS; and SunSoft Solaris on Sparc solid but Solaris on iAPX-86 has gone nowhere.
