SCO to strengthen partner base

After the recent renaming of Caldera to SCO, the company is looking at

strengthening its presence in the channel. This effort comes in the wake of the

formation of UnitedLinux. UnitedLinux is an alliance between Conectiva SA, SuSE

Linux, Turbolinux and SCO to streamline Linux development and certification.

SCO,

in the last year, registered a healthy growth of almost 22 percent across

certain segments like defense, education and government. It is now looking at

addressing the SMB market by offering a complete solution that encompasses

servers and desktops.

Realizing that it will be difficult to get a large number of partners to

start selling Unix and Linux products, the company is focusing on moving its

existing channel partners up the value chain. "We will focus on all the

qualitative aspects in developing our partners," says Srikanta Acharya,

Country Director, India and South East Asia, SCO Group.

Training partners to deliver solutions is top on SCO’s agenda. "We

will go to the extent of tailoring a training program for partners," adds

Srikanta. Also on the agenda are developing models that effectively show the

customer that total cost of ownership for Linux and Unix-based system is lower.

MOHIT CHHABRA