SCO Hires Senior VP of Marketing, Tweaks Unix Offerings

Published: February 23, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Unix distributor SCO Group has tapped Tim Negris, a former executive from IBM and Oracle to become its senior vice president of marketing. In that job, Negris will take over many of the responsibilities currently performed by Darl McBride, SCO's president and chief executive officer, leaving McBride to do other things--such as deal with SCO's legal issues as it prepares for its February 2007 trial against IBM concerning alleged Unix and intellectual property and Unix.

Specifically, Negris will be responsible for product marketing and sales, public relations, events, customer support, professional services, and direct and channel sales. That's a pretty full plate.

"With the roll out of significant new products in 2006, execution will be critical and Tim Negris has the background, experience and talent to drive SCO's overall sales and marketing as we focus our energies and resources around growth opportunities in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China," said McBride in a statement. "We believe this combines the right team of people focused on key areas that will help us succeed as a company." Negris was vice president of marketing for IBM's Software Group, and worked at Oracle in helping get Oracle 7 out the door. He is also noteworthy in that he coined the term "thin client" while at Oracle.

In a separate announcement, SCO said that it has certified the MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 databases to run on OpenServer 6, the result of a joint effort for the past six months by these two vendors. SCO is selling MySQL Network tech support and update services for the software and is offering a commercial reseller license to third parties that build solutions on OpenServer and that want to embed MySQL in their solutions. OpenServer 6 has also been tweaked with new features called the Online Data Manager and Mirroring for OpenServer 6. The former is a software-based RAID 5 implementation that also does performance analysis, file system resizing, and migration on RAID arrays, while the latter provides disk mirroring (which is called RAID 1 in the industry). SCO also put out UnixWare 7.1.4 Maintenance Pack 3, which allows OpenServer 6 applications to run on UnixWare and also provides enhancements to OpenSSL, OpenSSH, Samba, CUPS, and other popular open source components that SCO has woven into UnixWare over the past several years.