The Bloor Perspective: SCO's Tarantella gamble; Nokia's threat to the old world order; and the IT industry gets the business message

With Linux threatening to shred SCO's Unix strategy, the company is looking for a new position. Could the cornerstone of SCO's strategy be Tarantella?

Linux has hardly been out of the news in recent months, with the general conclusion being that the operating system (OS) has a pretty solid future. While much has been written about the impact this may have on Microsoft and Sun, perhaps the bigger question is what it will do to SCO - the company which is known as the Unix company. Or maybe the question should be - what of Monterey?

Monterey - the 64-bit version of the OS which is designed to run on Intel's IA-64 architecture - has, with IBM and SCO at the helm, been pitched as the great white hope of Unix. Although the first IA-64 processors are rolling off the production line for developers, mass production is not expected to start until next year - leaving Monterey playing the waiting game.

In the meantime, Linux - also available for IA-64 - is gaining acceptance at an accelerating pace as a server operating system, and SCO has been having problems with understanding where Linux fits. One senior executive was quoted as saying: "If the customer wants Linux, we will ship them Linux." Signs are that when Monterey turns up at the party, the guests will already have left.

And so to Tarantella. SCO has been keen to push the interface middleware in the past, but only if asked. Now it looks like the company will become more aggressive in its Tarantella marketing. The next version of the product, to be launched in January, will be pitched directly against the incumbent in the market - Citrix. These are dangerous tactics considering the hold that Citrix already has and its well-defined, ASP-oriented vision. However, it would appear that SCO has little choice.

** Nokia's brave new world **

Nokia became Europe's most valuable company last week, as its net worth pipped BP Amoco at the post. Not bad for a Nordic TV manufacturer. Almost as staggering is its prediction that cellular subscribers will triple to one billion over the next three years.

In case it wasn't recognised already, Nokia looks fixed to be setting a number of standards, not only for mobile phones but also for PDAs and ultimately for computing devices. Why? Because they are all part of the same infrastructure, and this is what makes Nokia so fascinating.

Just as information is power, so it is that in the information industry, whoever sets the standards rules the world. While the gorillas of the IT industry have been fighting trench warfare in the standards game, the mobile manufacturers have been co-ordinating their efforts in far more gentlemanly co-opetition.

These companies are fast becoming some of the most powerful in the world, and their size and their ability to co-ordinate efforts gives them the potential to trounce the bickering upstarts of the silicon age.

As the worlds of IT and communications continue to converge, the next standards battles will give the IT incumbents such as Microsoft, Oracle and Sun a true run for their money.

** The vendors are starting to talk business **

Since the dawn of IT, the principle of technology supporting business has been broadly accepted by all involved. Indeed, who could dispute the logic of computer systems existing to meet business needs? Despite its general acceptance, the practice has been fundamentally at odds with this principle. Evidence is mounting that this is about to change.

In part, this is down to a growing realisation that the stakes are becoming too high to allow for failure. The bottom line is the Internet - if it doesn't work, the customers and shareholders will go elsewhere, as the big hitters such as eBay and Charles Schwab have both discovered to their chagrin.

With this in mind, there are three fundamental requirements for both business and technology specialists to take into account:
* It is necessary to understanding the business
* It is necessary to understand the technologies involved
* It is necessary to manage the business and its supporting technologies as a cohesive whole.

Vendors are waking up to this reality. At a recent briefing on its DNA application architecture, Microsoft discussed the importance of understanding the business in order to maximise the chances of success. This isn't just talking about "switch it on and it works" success. This is success that directly impacts the organisation's bottom line. Microsoft's approach is to adopt a three-layer architecture, a component-based development model and, best of all, use of business process modelling (BPM) as the entry point to application development.

Other vendors are also seeing the business process as the key to the mapping between business and technology. Tertio and Computer Associates are both developing business process views into their enterprise management environments. IBM's ebusiness cycle illustrates the dynamic relationship between business and technology. And Unisys is seeing renewed interest in the UREP repository as a store of the models and relationships required in both development and resulting management of technology resources in the business environment.

It is one thing to claim to be business driven and another to achieve it. We believe that most organisations are today technology-driven, as new technologies are having the greatest impact on business strategy. However, once the business has been defined, technology must take its subordinate role as an enabler. This is not a case of guaranteed success or failure, more of minimising risk. As we move towards exploiting the new opportunities offered by the communications explosion, the chances of business success will be calculated on an organisation's understanding of both business and technology, and its ability to manage the dynamic relationship between the two.

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