Sunday, September 16, 2007
SCO Customers - An Oppurtunity for Sun
The company I work for sells plenty of software to people that still use SCO operating systems. For some of us it is a surprise to find that so many still use Unixware and Openserver. But these people have been using these OS's for a long time and have proven to be reliable. They'll figure if ain't broke then why fix it? With the recent news of SCO filing for bankruptcy this is a good time for Sun to step up and woo some customers over to Solaris. Traditionally these customers were not on Sun's radar because they were "too small" but with the success of Solaris x86 things have changed.
Conventional wisdom would be that SCO customers if they went somewhere else they would just migrate to Linux. But do you really think there will be many in the Linux community will be willing to reach out them? Besides that, from a technical standpoint Solaris is much closer to those operating systems and from my experience would be an easier port than Linux. My experience has been that most of these SCO users still see Solaris as a SPARC product running on big hardware and Solaris x86 is an after thought that doesn't support a whole lot of hardware. Now is a real good time to show them what its really like.
Conventional wisdom would be that SCO customers if they went somewhere else they would just migrate to Linux. But do you really think there will be many in the Linux community will be willing to reach out them? Besides that, from a technical standpoint Solaris is much closer to those operating systems and from my experience would be an easier port than Linux. My experience has been that most of these SCO users still see Solaris as a SPARC product running on big hardware and Solaris x86 is an after thought that doesn't support a whole lot of hardware. Now is a real good time to show them what its really like.
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You are quite right, this is a bigger opportunity than a lot of folks (including ones inside Sun) realize. OpenServer is far from dead, it has a huge legacy install base running on older hardware which is still limping along in sectors like retail, where hardware doesn't get upgraded every three years because it is cost prohibitive.
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