TriTeal Corp has cut a major deal to take Hewlett-Packard Co’s Common Desktop Environment implementation to market, but there is more to the agreement than first meets the eye. Hewlett-Packard has been using the Carlsbad, California-based company to put its currently shipping interface, the Visual User Environment, up on rival Unix systems. It is not expected to offer a Common Desktop Environment implementation of its own until the fabled HP-UX 10.0 arrives next year. As well as offering an enhanced implementation of the Hewlett-Packard Common Desktop Environment source tree to the installed HP-UX 9.X base, TriTeal will also license the interface technology to third party systems vendors outside the Common Desktop Environment development group, Hewlett-Packard, IBM Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and Novell Inc, to X terminal firms that intend to offer Common Desktop Environment in ROM and the personal computer X server vendors who will bring Common Desktop to Microsoft Corp desktop users via an X Window. In effect it has been picked up as Hewlett-Packard’s Common Desktop franchise holder, a relationship apparently spurned by Santa Cruz Operation Inc subsidiary IXI Ltd which was also courted for the job. Meanwhile, although no-one at the firm would comment, presumably TriTeal could easily move to offer a shrink-wrapped binary version of its TriTeal Enterprise Desktop 4.0 on all Unixes. Enterprise Desktop includes the graphical workspace and multiple panel support that TriTealdeveloped for the Visual User Environment and which it is also bringing to the AIX product. The enhancements can bring a vendor’s particular control panel and box styling metaphor to Common Desktop without, the company claims, violating the Common Desktop source tree, which is supposed to remain common across implementations. Although IBM Corp has brought the industry’s first Common Desktop implementation to market on AIX 4.1, based on a preliminary code release, implementations of the final Common Desktop 1.0 source tree specification, which goes to X/Open Co Ltd in December, are not expected until around the second quarter of next year. Any changes handed down by X/Open will feature in new builds through 1995. Enterprise Desktop 4.0 is already scheduled to be available across all MIPS Application Binary Interface-compliant systems following TriTeal’s deal with MIPS Technology owner Silicon Graphics Inc. TriTeal envisages resellers and vendors offering its Common Desktop enhancements, plus future technology such as the free facsimile tool it is doing, as applications bundled with Common Desktop Environment.
Not be serviced
It also anticipates a market that includes a large installed base of SunOS, HP-UX and other operating system users that will not be serviced by the vendors themselves who are too busy with current releases. The Enterprise Desktop will list for between $300 and $400. Users buying HP VUE now, currently available on Solaris, SunOS, OSF/1, AIX 3.2.5 and AT&T Global Information Solutions, will be upgraded to Enterprise Desktop, where implementations exist. Sceptics of the whole Common Desktop initiative characterise the interface as an expensive political statement that is stalling in the blocks. TriTeal argues that the environment will go beyond release 1.0 once X/Open approves the specification and standard products ship, precisely because the vendors have spent tens of millions of dollars getting to a common source tree. Indeed TriTeal expects other vendors, including Digital Equipment Corp, which was snubbed first time around, to chip into a CDE 2.0 Pre-Structured Technology process at the Open Software Foundation. TriTeal may even offer its own technologies, such as the facsimile tool, and its services as a subcontract developer to the Software Foundation. TriTeal, a privately-held company trading at $2m to $3m per month, will have 50 staff by the end of the year. Its non-US distribution outlets, such as Artecon UK, provide it with around 30% of its revenues now, a share it expects to climb to 50% as it opens planned European and Pac
ific Rim subsidiaries. It is seeking other distribution partnerships too. Other products include the Hewlett-Packard Task Broker job distribution tool it has put up on third party systems.
