Tech Update interviewed Benoy Tamang, Caldera VP of strategic development to get the details on Caldera's strategy regarding the UnitedLinux effort. This is part one of a two-part interview.

Tech Update: What was the motivation for forming UnitedLinux?

Tamang: Each company has a different motive; I'll tell you the three motives for Caldera. Number one: Customers who are channel-based system integrators who implement Linux out in the field, they wanted to make sure that our Linux products had more applications, a variety of applications that they could implement in conjunction with the OS. So there was a need to have more applications available at any given point in time. Like a menu, so they could choose and deploy. Our customers, of course, at the end-user level similarly have been talking about that for awhile. So, number one, a lot of requests for, "Can we have this application or this application," you name it. Much more required.

Benoy Tamang VP, strategic development Caldera

Number two: Industry partners, such as the hardware manufacturers and the application ISV vendors themselves, were similarly echoing back, "Well, in order to get more applications and things, there seems to be certainly a lot of money spent on these certification procedures that we have for your products SuSE, Conectiva and so forth." And so we also knew that there was an inordinate amount of duplication being performed, and that was being echoed back by our industry partners.

Number three: At the same time, when it came to discussions and being on initiatives and boards for LSB or for Linux community vendors and Linux internationalization standards group, the same parties would be there at the same time. So inevitably the technical people started talking to each other, and just said, "Why are we duplicating all of these efforts and creating our own versions?" And therefore we found, for number three, a possible area where the Linux companies themselves didn't have to duplicate the basic elements. Remove number 2, and the extra work that the ISVs and IHVs were dealing with. And number three--back to customers and channel partners themselves--be able to provide a standard version that had a lot more choices of applications and anything that is associated with having a simplified version based on open standards. Those were the three motives.

Tech Update: The basic UnitedLinux product, then, is the operating system plus some core applications, and each of the participants can enhance that in any way without altering with code.

Tamang: Absolutely correct. They can even mess around with the code if they want, but they're just going to negate some of the testing that we'll have gone through and the stamps that we will have provided through our third-party ISVs and IHVs--which nobody would want to break--but we have the full capability to do so if we wanted to.

Tech Update: And any deals or agreements that any one of the participants had with other hardware or software vendors prior to this deal are still intact?

Tamang: Correct. We still have responsibility and relationship managers, for example, working with any one of the partners that we previously had, and we still continue to go back to them.

Tech Update: Are there any other ways that the four companies now will try to leverage their greater strength as an alliance?

Tamang: We are also going to be working very diligently on the certification process, the test suites. Those things they're working on right now as we speak, which should reduce some of those issues so that when the product ships to the first customer, it's already gone through a sufficient battery of tests and sufficient external review, audits, whatever is required before it's released.

The other element that we'll all really get to win together on is that the UnitedLinux brand is what will perpetuate and link the four companies together such that there will be confidence amongst all business users that if they were to buy a certain product from any one of the four current companies, if it has a label saying "Powered by UnitedLinux," they know that whatever is done to that technology to make it better for whatever a geo needs, will come back to the LLC--the UnitedLinux group--and be made available to everybody else. So that's another reason why we're able to geographically take advantage of our relationships. Turbo in Japan, for example, will be much more likely to get the newest driver issues that Fujitsu may be producing or testing. And after Turbo tests and certifies, it comes back into UnitedLinux so that the UnitedLinux members then have the capability to be able to have that particular driver also.

Tech Update: Do you foresee UnitedLinux essentially becoming a brand with a combined sales or support force under certain circumstances?

Tamang: Of course we went through all of those scenarios. But we have emphatically and definitively made a commitment to keep any of the selling to be non-UnitedLinux. There's no neutral body or company of employees at UnitedLinux. The legs and arms of UnitedLinux are the four companies that currently exist--that includes the selling and supporting. There of course is going to be a natural escalation path for support issues that comes up through each one of the technical groups. Remember that all of us have engineers as well as code contribution into this offering, and if questions and such can't be answered we'll talk to each other and get the answers. But the physical commercial transaction--even the support agreements--will be conducted by the legs and arms, the four companies, with the channel or end user directly. But no brown-suited sales people from UnitedLinux.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this interview, where Benoy discusses the Red Hat factor.

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