1. What is the core area of technology of SCO Group and who are your target customers and which are the vertical markets that you cater to?
SCO's core area of technology is the UNIX operating system, of which we have two, OpenServer and UnixWare. SCO's target customers tend to be small-to-medium businesses and branch offices. 

2. What are your main solutions or product lines? Could you elaborate on them?
SCO's main solutions are operating systems and business solutions that add value to those operating systems. Our operating systems are OpenServer and UnixWare. Some of our business solutions include such items as authentication products and messaging products that run on top of our operating systems. 

3. For the first quarter of fiscal 2003 ended January 31, 2003, The SCO Group reported a net loss of $724,000, or $0.06 per share, on revenue of $13.5 million, compared to a net loss of $11.0 million, or $0.77 per share, on revenue of $17.9 million for the comparative quarter of the prior year. For the first time in the Company's history The SCO Group has generated positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. To what do you attribute this remarkable achievement?

It gets even better than that. Last week we gave guidance for our 2nd fiscal quarter that ended on April 30th. The Company expects to report net income of approximately $4.0 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, on estimated revenue of $21.0 million. We will report our actual earnings on May 28th and hold a formal earnings call.

We attribute this to the company's renewed focus on our core technology, UNIX. We have signed two different licensing deals during our 2nd quarter that provided substantial increases in revenue and provided us with some nice growth. We announced one of these licensing deals during this past week stating that Microsoft had chosen to license our UNIX source code and patents. 

4.The SCO Group has announced that it has been named a five-star vendor in VARBusiness magazine's annual Partner Programs Guide. The VARBusiness Partner Programs Guide polls solution providers, representing various business segments and sizes, to assess the importance of 16 key vendor partner-program elements including training, certification and sales leads. What do you think led to this positive assessment among your peers?

This will probably sound trite, but it really came down to listening to our partners and delivering on that. We have a reseller partner counsel that meets monthly to discuss the things we're doing well, and things we could be doing better. This is a faithful group of resellers that really tell it like it is. We find their feedback and that of many others invaluable as we fine tune our channel programs. Our company lives and dies by its resellers, so we really have to cater to them. 

5.The SCO Group has said that its new Web services strategy that includes a framework known as SCOx is geared towards bringing SCO's developers, resellers and small-to-medium (SMB) business customers running SCO Unix and Linux to the world of Web services. How do you aim to fulfill this rather tall target? Is there any special USP that can over ride some of hugely popular competitors?


We don't think that many of our competitors are addressing the markets that we service, so we feel we have an advantage there. We intend to use our vast developer network and provide them with the industry standard tools and technologies (such as SOAP, XML, etc.) that they need to "Web services-enable" their applications. Then we plan to optimize our platforms for running these Web services-enabled applications. No company can be successful without partnerships, and we intend to partner with experts in this area to help us accomplish our goals. Some of these experts include Vultus, Janus Logix and many others. 

6. IN this time of economic upheaval a lot of vendors are merging and there is a lot of consolidation going on in the industry. How much does the SCO Group believe in M&A and partnerships and alliances? What are the different kinds of partnerships that the SCO Group forms?

We strongly believe in it. With challenges come opportunities, and we think that there are a lot of great opportunities to be had out there right now. You'll see in the coming months how our partnerships and alliances will benefit the company in helping to deliver on our Web services strategy. 

7. The IT industry has been in an economic slump over the past two years and it has still not shown signs of improving. How did the SCO Group ride this economic downswing and how did you perform in these ensuing years?

It's no secret that our company, along with nearly everyone else, felt some of the pain of our struggling economy. What SCO did to overcome those challenges is focus on our intellectual property, our core UNIX business. When we focused more on what we had, we realized that we had a tremendous asset and that others valued that asset as well. We signed two major licensing deals of our UNIX intellectual property during the past quarter. More than 30,000 licenses to SCO's UNIX intellectual property have been issued over the years to IT companies, corporations, universities and private institutions. If we keep leveraging this core asset, we will continue to be successful. 

8. Since inception the SCO Group has come a long way. What is your focus for the years ahead and how do you plan on enhancing your market share. What do you think about diversifying into newer technology to complement and supplement your existing range of products?

In the years ahead, we will continue to license our core asset, UNIX, and concentrate on our growth strategy around Web services with our SCOx framework. Web services will help customers grow their business so much more. Eventually we plan to help incorporate solutions from other Web services vendors such as Microsoft with .NET and Sun Microsystems with SunOne. We will not limit the SCOx framework to SCO-only solutions. We will incorporate some of the best Web services solutions from all over the industry

About Darl McBride 
As President and Chief Executive Officer of SCO, Darl McBride is responsible for the company's strategic direction and planning. He oversees all aspects of the company including engineering, support, marketing and sales.

A technology industry veteran, McBride has 19 years of executive management and leadership experience. Before joining SCO, McBride was the president of Franklin Covey's online planning business. Prior to that, McBride has been the CEO of PointServe, a workforce optimization software company; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of SBI and Company, a professional services company. While at the helm of these companies, McBride was responsible for raising more than $100 million in venture capital.

McBride has also been the senior vice president of IKON Office Solutions where he managed 4,000 employees and the buildup of a $500 million systems integration unit through numerous acquisitions, channel programs, and industry partnerships. From 1988 to 1996, he worked at networking leader Novell where he was responsible for growing Novell Japan's growth to more than $100 million in revenue. He concluded his tenure at Novell as vice president and general manager of Novell's Embedded Systems Division (NEST).

McBride holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Brigham Young University and received a Masters degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Top