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How Tarantella is creeping up on Citrix

Tags:
Tarantella,
MetaFrame,
Canaveral IQ,
New Moon Systems

Matt Loney ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 13 Oct 2003 15:00 BST

A year ago, a Lehman Brothers report said New Moon Systems was "making aggressive steps to build a relationship with Microsoft." At the time Marc Lowe, chief executive of New Moon, said that with its help, Microsoft could compete directly with Citrix.

It never happened. Instead, earlier this year, New Moon Systems was quietly snapped up by Tarantella, and therein lies an increasingly potent threat to Citrix, as well as an increasingly viable alternative for companies who have no Unix admin skills.

Tarantella is the business unit that was left over when the original SCO Group sold its operating systems division to Caldera, which subsequently changed its name to the (new) SCO Group and set about suing every Unix user and vendor in sight. Tarantella, by contrast, has remained relatively quiet, but under the stewardship of Doug Michels it has been far from inactive.

The New Moon Systems acquisition has given Tarantella something it never previously had: an offering for Windows shops.

New Moon Systems was founded in 1995, and was developed to provide remote access to Windows applications. The company -- now a division of Tarantella -- is a pure Windows play. Everything is Windows-centric, and it is all about building a management layer on top of Windows Terminal Services, using the Remote Desktop Protocol.

What New Moon Systems did not want to do was to take the Citrix approach and rebuild what already exists. Instead, the company looked at what is missing in Windows Application Server -- resource-based load balancing, printing, and application publishing, and focused on those areas. The idea was to give -- out of the box -- clients access to applications. Key to the strategy was to make something that would be easy to install.

New Moon systems believes that, like Citrix, it has a good few years on Microsoft. Max Herrmann, vice president of marketing and strategy at New Moon Systems, told me when we met recently that he reckons it would take Microsoft three to four years to come up with the next major release -- which will be the earliest that the company will be able to address the management shortcomings in Terminal Services.

What this means for Tarantella -- and for Tarantella's customers -- is that the company now has two remote access solutions: Canaveral iQ from New Moon Systems, and the eponymous Tarantella. Together, these could spell trouble for Citrix.

In the past, Tarantella could not get into companies that had no Unix admin skills because its product is Unix-based, even though it can be used to deliver both Unix and Windows applications to users. This meant that Citrix had, essentially, a clear run in firms that have only Windows expertise. Now, the acquisition by Tarantella of New Moon Systems has muddied the waters, meaning that Doug Michels' outfit can now talk to Windows shops. At some point in the future we are likely to see a version of Tarantella that runs on Windows, but right now the company is likely to be content with what it has.

And what Tarantella has should make Citrix nervous; the significance of the New Moon Systems acquisition is unlikely to be lost on Microsoft, and may just make it feel that little bit less like it really needs Citrix to survive.