Caldera Changes its Captain but Stays the Course
By: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Thursday, June 27, 2002 05:44:50 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4282/1/
Say Hi to the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss?
Founder Ransom Love may have stepped away from the wheel at business Linux company Caldera (http://www.caldera.com), but new CEO and President Darl McBride of Caldera will be staying the Caldera course.
In a day of many changes for Caldera, what was perhaps the most significant was how much stayed the same. Although long time CEO and President Ransom Love moved out of the executive office, he's moving right into de facto leadership of UnitedLinux, where he'll serve as first among equals in guiding UnitedLinux through the shoals of fine details needed to take UnitedLinux (http://www.unitedlinux.com) from good general idea to specific products and market strategies.
Darl McBride may be new to Linux, but he brings 18 years of executive management and leadership experience to Caldera's helm. Immediately, before coming to Caldera, he was president of Franklin Covey's (http://www.franklincovey.com) well thought of online planning business. Before that he had been CEO of PointServe and CEO of SBI and Company, a professional services company with strong IBM and Oracle ties.
While McBride may not know Linux, he does know Love and others of the Caldera executive team having worked with them at Novell. He also knows where he wants to take Caldera and that's to keep them on the course they're already on. Specifically, Caldera remains committed to its reseller channel, UnitedLinux, its older Unix platforms such as OpenServer and OpenUnix (formerly UnixWare), small to medium businesses and its distributed enterprise customers like Eckerd Drugs and McDonalds. In short, McBride says, "Caldera has the right products, services, sales channels, and employees to be a very successful company."
McBride specifically said that that the SCO Unixes are not going away. As he noted, "McDonalds isn't going to give it up anytime soon." While admitting, "customers aren't buying much new SCO Unix," he continues, "they're also not switching either." He believes that once the economy levels off, the older Unix products will sell again.
Looking ahead, McBride sees resellers becoming even more important to Caldera. Besides continuing support for UnitedLinux and its Unix products, he stated that bringing Web Services and the Volution line of server applications to small and medium sized business customers will be an important part of Caldera's future strategy and for that to happen, "resellers are essential."
Love Loves his Work
Love, while not leading UnitedLinux, will be coordinating the working board and CEO efforts to bring UnitedLinux to port. This will involve everything from fine-tuning technical details to setting up the organizational structure.
Specifically, this will start by further refining and defining UnitedLinux's membership levels. UnitedLinux, Love says, is all about producing a commercial Linux business server.
But that doesn't mean that Linux companies like Debian and Slackware, who don't currently target the business server market can't join. Love, with the support and participation of his fellow UnitedLinux executives, will initially be spending their time defining UnitedLinux membership levels for other Linux companies and for independent software vendors.
According to Caldera and SuSE officials, UnitedLinux has been a roaring success and Love says, "has far surpassed expectations." Now, though, "there is an increased urgency to get UnitedLinux out and running." That will be Love's assignment over the next year.
Dollars and Cents
Finally, Caldera also agreed to purchase its common stock shares held by two significant shareholders, Tarantella (http://www.tarantella.com) and MTI Technology (http://www.mti.com) The deal, to be finalized in early July, will return 4.4 million shares, about 31% of Caldera's issued and outstanding common stock. Caldera will be paying approximately 93 cents per share.
Caldera, after a four to one reverse stock split in May has continued to struggle on the NASDAQ. Today, in the wake of its new leadership announcement, the stock gained 26.67% to a price of 76 cents a share on higher than normal trading. That would be much more impressive, however, if the company hadn't plunged from 77 cents to 60 cents on the previous day, June 26th.
In addition, Caldera and Tarantella modified the agreement that lead to Caldera taking over the SCO operating systems. The gist of the modifications was to eliminate Tarantella's right to OpenServer earn-out revenues. Specifically, in return for a $500,000 payment, Caldera will no longer need to give Tarantella 45 percent of its OpenServer revenue over $22 million this year. And, had the agreement stayed in place, in the next fiscal year (beginning November 1st 2002), 45 percent of all revenue beyond $9 million.
Will all these changes be enough to see Caldera sail to financial success? Only time will tell, but even their most ardent critics would have to admit that Caldera is certainly trying hard to make a go of the Intel Unix and Linux business.
Will UnitedLinux fare better with Love at the tiller? Here, the answer seems to be a more positive yes. UnitedLinux has made little public progress since it's late May launch, and a strong, well-known Linux leader guiding the ship should help it to give Red Hat a run for the all important Linux business server market share.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is a freelance writer, and editor of Practical Technology (http://www.practical-tech.com)