SCO TEAMS WITH INTEL TO ACCELERATE UNIX SYSTEM GROWTH AND ADOPTION Companies Use Uniform Driver Interface to Deliver Common Device Support Across Multiple UNIX Operating Systems INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, Palm Springs, CA (September 16, 1998) - In a move aimed at accelerating the growth of UNIX systems on Intel processor-based servers, SCO (NASDAQ:SCOC) today announced its support of Intel Corporation's adoption of the Uniform Driver Interface (UDI) as a standard device interface. In addition, Intel will work with SCO and Project UDI, to port UDI to the Linux operating system and distribute as freeware. UDI allows device drivers to be portable across both hardware platforms and operating systems without any changes to the driver source. This significantly lowers the cost of driver development, speeds time-to-market of new devices, and allows manufacturers to allocate development resource on improving device performance, features and functionality. SCO held the first public demonstration of this technology at SCO Forum98 last month, running the same driver under the SCO OpenServer, SCO UnixWare 2, UnixWare 7, and the Hewlett-Packard HP-UX operating systems. UDI is a specification backed by multiple UNIX system providers, including Compaq, HP, IBM, NCR, SCO, and Sun Microsystems, as well as leading companies such as Adaptec, Interphase Corporation and Lockheed Martin. SCO was instrumental in proving the UDI concept and driving the formation of a multi-company, joint development effort to produce a prototype UDI environment implementation and sample drivers. This project, based on core code provided by SCO, resulted in working UDI implementations on seven different operating systems. "Standardization in this industry is what drives up the performance and innovation curves," said Ray Anderson, SCO's senior vice president, Marketing. "Intel's support of UDI as a standard means that all UNIX OS vendors can use a common device driver on all Intel platforms. SCO and Intel will strongly support the movement to standardize the use of UDI for all UNIX platforms on Intel, which we believe will generate even more momentum for the already exploding UNIX on Intel market." "Accelerating the deployment of UNIX on Intel-based servers is an important element in the growth of the standard high volume server model and in bringing price/performance advantages to the reliable, available and scalable benefits of UNIX," said John Miner, Intel vice president and general manager, Enterprise Server Group. "SCO and Project UDI have already made a great deal of progress in defining a common framework and Intel is doing its part to deliver it to the industry." Cost savings is among the many benefits of UDI by reducing a company's time and resources in developing and testing of drivers. Independent research firm, International Data Corporation (IDC), recognizes this as a substantial benefit for developers and end-users. "Having a standard device driver infrastructure may result in significant savings to end-user organizations and developers alike," said Dan Kusnetzky, program director for International Data Corporation's operating environments and serverware programs. "If an end-user organization could reduce the staffing required to install and maintain its server software by only one person, that could result in a three quarter of a million dollars savings over five years. If a developer was able to support a broad number of systems with less system testing and fewer engineers doing testing, the savings could stack up to be even more." UDI for Open Source Community SCO strongly supports the growth of standards-based computing and encouragement of open systems development. SCO, with Intel and Project UDI, will support the open source community by working to ensure that UDI works on the Linux operating system. Anderson continued, "The Linux and open source movements are powerful forces in the industry that are creating a huge resurgence in the interest in the UNIX System. It helps to bring the community together again and with UDI available on the Linux system, their developers can use the latest UNIX devices and peripherals on the market." About UDI UDI isolates drivers from operating system policies, as well as platform and I/O bus dependencies. This allows driver development to be totally independent of OS development. In addition, the UDI architecture insulates drivers from platform specifics such as byte-ordering, DMA implications, multi-processing, interrupt implementations and I/O bus topologies. More information on Project UDI is available at http://www.sco.com/UDI About SCO SCO is the world's number one provider of UNIX server operating systems, and the leading provider of network computing software that enables clients of all kinds - including, PCs, graphical terminals, NCs, and other devices - to have Webtop access to business-critical applications running on servers of all kinds. SCO designed Tarantella software, the world's first application broker for network computing. SCO sells and supports its products through a worldwide network of distributors, resellers, systems integrators, and OEMs. For more information, see SCO's WWW home page at: http://www.sco.com . # # # SCO, The Santa Cruz Operation, the SCO logo, SCO OpenServer, Tarantella, the Tarantella logo, and UnixWare are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. in the US and other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries. All other brand and product names are or may be trademarks of, and are used to identify products or services of, their respective owners. ___________________ Brian Ziel Manager, Product PR Tel: 831-427-7252 Fax: 831-427-5418 Email: mailto:bri...@sco.com Press: http://www.sco.com/press ___________________