Vultus Deal Bolsters SCOs Web Services Strategy

The SCO Group is beefing up its Web services offerings with the acquisition of Vultus Inc. and its WebFace Solution Suite.

SCO, which is suing IBM for more than $1 billion in a contract dispute and which maintains that Linux is an unauthorized derivative of Unix, on Tuesday said it has acquired Vultus assets, engineering personnel and technology, which will become a core component of SCOx, the formation of which was first exclusively reported by eWEEK.

SCOx is a framework geared at bringing SCOs developers, resellers and small-to-medium business (SMB) customers running SCO Unix and Linux to the world of Web services.

SCO WebFace Solution Suite, as the Vultus product will now be known, is a Web application development environment that allows customers to create and deploy applications in a browser without the need for installed plug-ins or Java. It is built on SCOs Unix operating system, e-business services, and industry standards like XML, SOAP and UDDI.

SCO Vice President Jeff Hunsaker said the suite and SCOx will provide the tools and foundation to allow partners to migrate legacy systems to the Web, integrate service-oriented architectures and build next-generation applications in a Web services framework.

As such, the acquisition of Vultus professional services team responsible for the complex Web application migration, integration and development components was an important part of the deal, he said.

“This is an important step in bringing together a Web services framework that we can provide to our customers, particularly as SCO is targeting Web services as a platform for growth. We look forward to introducing many of these technologies at our SCO Forum in Las Vegas next month,” Hunsaker said.

The Vultus acquisition comes just a day after SCO called for business users of Linux to pay for UnixWare licenses that would indemnify them against past copyright violations and allow them to use Linux in a run-time, binary format.

SCO on Monday also expanded its attack on Linux and is now claiming for the first time that Linux users are violating its Unix copyrights, particularly as SCO has now registered and received U.S. copyright for its Unix System V source code.

“The case started off as a contract dispute with IBM and did not involve intellectual property or copyright. As of today its a different game, and Linux users now do have a copyright issue to deal with,” SCO CEO and President Darl McBride told a media teleconference on Monday.