At his company"s annual SCO Forum in Las Vegas on Monday, Darl McBride, president and CEO of The SCO Group Inc., talked with Computerworld about the company"s ongoing legal battle against IBM and others, and about its newly minted plans for its future. Contrary to the claims of critics, McBride said, SCO"s future doesn"t hinge on winning its legal fight. Excerpts from the interview follow.
Have there been any surprises in SCO"s 2-year-old legal fight against IBM, Novell Inc. and others? Did you expect more business users to license Unix code from your SCOSource intellectual property licensing group in light of your lawsuits? The SCOsource licensing deals were originally not created by us but from requests by customers. They didn"t want to wait for the conclusion of the legal battles, and they wanted to use Linux with SCO Unix licenses. We had some initial takers. People started signing up until other companies started popping up with indemnification and said, "We will cover you" if SCO ultimately wins its court fight.
It"s kind of been an interesting scenario. We"re just not pursuing it anymore. We just don"t have time to do everything. Let"s get our courtroom victories and then we"ll re-evaluate the situation.
For the dozen or so times that people have said the sky is falling on SCO, the sky is still up there.
What is SCO"s strategy until the IBM case goes to trial in February 2007? After the lawsuit was filed, we sat down as a management team almost a year ago and we asked, Where are we trying to go? We put down a stake in the ground and said we want to be the leaders in agile computing by 2010. Agile computing is where you can take your business applications with you wherever you are, on whatever device you have. What isn"t out there today is that line of business with wireless built in.
The last 25 years was about business applications. The next 25 years will be about business applications, but on new devices. It"s technology we had, but we"re building on it. Clearly, that"s opening a lot of new growth opportunities for the company. We will absolutely be announcing it in September. This is fundamentally unique. It changes the game, because with the real-time connectivity and the high-bandwidth availability, it becomes a natural that it would become a business community tool.
Critics have been saying that since the lawsuits, SCO has become a company of IP rights and can no longer be seen as a products company. That"s not so? SCO is focusing on new products, even as the lawsuits continue? The legal-fee caps placed on our legal expenses earlier allow us now to focus on our products. Had we not had the caps on the fees, the company might not even be here in the future because it would continue to have to pay out high legal expenses. As long as we can generate cash with our products, we can keep focusing on innovation.
Some critics have also said that if SCO loses its case against IBM, it"s finished as a company. What happens to SCO if it wins, and what happens if it loses? I thought in the past that if we lose, we were done. But I have totally changed my view on that. If we lose, we still have the start-up technologies with brand reach around the world. If we win, you pour fire on that mega-start-up and it just gets hotter. If we win, I don"t think other lawsuits will be necessary. When you have a precedent like that, there"s really no reason for more lawsuits. We"re not sitting here declaring victory. What we"re saying is that we have a strong set of claims.
What, then, is the future for SCO? We want to backfill so our technologies are as big as our brand. We think two years from now is the right time for the next SCO OpenServer update. We"ve got a lot of things bubbling up.
Also, we just brought in Tim Negris, our new senior vice president of marketing. He understands our industry, he understands SCO, and he knows how to get our products out there. At the same point in time where people are saying that SCO is dead, we"re going the other way, rainmaking, to reach out. The new products are a real opportunity. Where we think our biggest value is going to be is with large corporate users.
Whether we win or lose in the courtroom, if we"re not off doing development work, then what are we doing? The core employees at SCO are an extremely resilient bunch. It"s pretty rejuvenating to come to work and have these kinds of people around you. I like our chances far better now, obviously more than three years ago. I like our chances now not just in the courtroom, but in the marketplace.