Expert View

September 18, 2002
"The Indian market contributes 3.5 percent to The SCO Group's global revenue," says Srikanta Acharya

Kaushik Phukan

NEW DELHI -- Caldera International Inc., a company offering UNIX, Linux and Volution product lines and services, has recently changed its name to The SCO Group. It acquired SCO, but retained the name of SCO products. As the SCO brand seemed to be more well known Caldera decided to rename itself as The SCO Group.

The SCO Group said that the renaming will enable solution providers to use strength of the SCO brand when selling Linux solutions, including SCO's Linux-based products powered by United Linux (to be released later this year). India remains a major market for the company. In fact, it is one of the top revenue grosser. Besides, the company's development center has recently been given the responsibility of developing engineering products. Srikanta Acharya, country director, India and South East Asia, The SCO Group spoke to Convergence Plus about the company's new image and its plans for the Indian market.

CP: What made you change the name of the company from Caldera to The SCO Group?

Srikanta Acharya: The SCO name was more recognized. Partners and customers were more in the know-how about SCO. We never even had to introduce and tell them what SCO was all about. Therefore, we felt that it was better to go for the SCO name.

Through this, we also want to reaffirm that we are not moving away from UNIX. In fact, we will put lots of emphasis on UNIX. Our other competency -- Linux -- will still be a much-focused area of our company. Our new product, UnitedLinux, will be out later this year by Q4. We have not done too many changes as such, except to name the whole group as The SCO Group.

CP: What is the India Engineering Center involved in at present?

Srikanta Acharya: We are getting more and more into the engineering aspects of the product. Many companies have started investing more and more on the engineering side. We see a large opportunity here. Earlier, the India Center only used to provide services customers used to ask for. Now, we have a big engineering team that will take part in engineering, product manufacturing, designing and the overall development of the product.

CP: What has been the contribution of the India Engineering Center?

Srikanta Acharya: Till recently, the India Engineering Center has been working on the company's products or on what customers need. We have been given the responsibility of the engineering side only about three months back. You will soon get to know about new patents being filed and new products being developed here. As and when it happens we are going to announce it. We have a lot more products coming.

CP: Do you plan to recruit more Indian professionals for the center?

Srikanta Acharya: I clearly see the development center expanding. As and when, the development center expands, we will hire Indian professionals. More and more engineering work will be done for the company from the India Engineering Center. Earlier, they were doing engineering work as a part of delivery to the customers, but now we will be delivering to the company as well.

CP: With so may companies going into and adopting Linux and UNIX, how do you plan to meet the challenges from your competitors?

Srikanta Acharya: A Linux core competency company like us will do most of the activities on Linux. We have been in the market for a long time and were there even before others thought about Linux. Many companies are adopting Linux and we see them as our clients, not as our competition. We are ready for challenges on the Linux front.

We are also putting in more engineering efforts on the UNIX side. We own the UNIX brand and its IPR. It came from AT&T to Novell to SCO to Caldera and now to The SCO Group. The plan is to reinforce the UnixWare and OpenServer product lines, and to create a migration path from one to the other.

CP: What is the market segment that you are looking at?

Srikanta Acharya: Even though we are well equipped to meet the needs of small to large enterprises, we are presently focusing more on the small and medium users.

CP: What is the contribution of the Indian market to the company's global revenues?

Srikanta Acharya: India is among the top-ten revenue grosser for the company. We contribute more than 3.5 percent to worldwide revenue. We contribute much higher than what other MNCs like Microsoft, Oracle or even IBM operating in India contribute to the global revenue of the company [the Indian side of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and others contribute only around one percent to the global revenue]. We are in a high priority list in our corporate headquarters.

Contact:
The SCO Group
Tel: 91-11-3736466
Fax: 91-11-335-9997
Email: shajyk@caldera.com
Web: www.caldera.com
Contact: Shajy Koshy