SCO ups its ante on services

NEW DELHI: SCO, formerly Caldera, would now focus aggressively on providing services as a growth area. After building up a considerable client base, developer's base and product line, foraying into services was but a natural roadmap for the company's growth. Services would be in terms of providing high-end technical consulting or professional consulting services.

SCO expects to increase its turnover from services to 10 percent globally in a year's time. Consulting and services for SCO India currently is a small revenue base but is expected to increase to about 5 percent of the company's turnover in the country.

Opinder Bawa, Senior VP, Technology, SCO Worldwide said that he sees immense growth potential of the company in providing high-end technical consulting from the country. The company plans to expand its development center in the country to providing technical support services in the global market.

Some services, which Bawa mentioned could be offered out of India, include checking out vulnerability of servers, developing applications for e-commerce, migration of legacy systems and the like. SCO, which was taken over by Caldera, has been renamed SCO recently. The company wanted to leverage on its two product lines Open Server (OS) and Unix Ware, both from SCO, which have tremendous mindshare as opposed to Caldera, which was only known as a Linux player.

All along the company's focus has been on the OS front. The company's new mandate is to focus on expanding its presence in the middleware segment, which would involve building applications on the OS. The company currently has a reseller base of 50 with an installed base of over 60,000 servers. The developer's community has around 30 companies actively working with SCO with over 1,600 registered developers who have evinced interest in joining the SCO developer community.

The roadmap for SCO would be to develop its product line for ATMs called ‘smallfoot’, accelerate the United Linux Initiative and develop an OS for the desktop space as well. In India, SCO plans to expand its presence by pushing its developer's products on the SCO platform through its reseller's base, take equity holding in partner's company's, acquire some companies and push products at the OEM level through its partners.