Unix is not dead and neither is the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), according to Doug Michels, president and chief executive, in his keynote speech at the SCO Forum developers' conference today.

While he acknowledged the Unix market was now "mature", Michels claimed that maturity was not the same as death. The market was worth $35 billion in hardware and software sales last year and was still growing, while according to IDC, Unix would still remain the leading operating system until 2002, he said.

?We?ve been through a lot of changes in the past year and we like to think of ourselves as 'the new SCO'. We?ve made the organisation simpler, adopted a more centralised, functional approach to move faster and more efficiently, and we?ve got a new executive team that is committed to Unix,? he went on.

He explained that the company saw its growth coming from two main areas in future. One is a move out of the department into the data centre with two key technologies, Unixware 7 and its related clustering technology ,based on Tandem?s Nonstop Cluster.

The other will come through SCO's Tarantella next generation emulation software.

?We?re committed to small and medium businesses, even as we?re wanting to grow into the enterprise. But, it?s important for us to go there, where Unix is very strong and we expect to provide enterprise level performance by 2000," explained Michels.

"For SCO, Unixware 7 will become very significant for revenues. Although it made 20 per cent of our Unix revenues this year, it will be a lot higher next year. I think Tarantella has the makings of a great company too. It will come into bloom over the next 12 months and we?ll start to have real presence in the enterprise.?

He added that SCO was also going to be coming out with fixed function computers later this year. ?The customer will never know it?s Unix, but they?ll be very high volume, fixed cost boxes,? he said.

But, to try to boost sales in these potential growth markets, the company intends to focus on developing stronger relationships with core enterprise ISVs such as Oracle and Informix and to build a professional services organisation to help resellers deal with increasingly complex customer environments.

It has also renewed a seemingly wavering commitment to the channel by appointing new staff to make it easier for resellers to do business with it and to provide them with more day-to-day contact.