Winter 2009

Dear SCO Partners,

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support and to give you an update on several recent developments at SCO. SCO UNIX is now in its 30 th year, delivering stable, reliable operating systems that run thousands of businesses around the world. We appreciate your continued support over these many years. We have obviously had a rough past few years; but we are taking important steps to insure the future viability of the company.

In this newsletter, you will find important updates regarding SCO from both a product and company perspective. Included are articles from Intel regarding their Modular Server as well as Dell regarding new certifications. Also included are updates on maintenance releases for SCO UNIX as well as our new virtualization solutions.

Over the past nine months, we have been working closely with investment groups who have expressed great interest in the business and who have indicated they have plans to participate in the auction process. If SCO does not sell off certain assets, we have taken the necessary steps to continue to market and to sell our UNIX operating systems as we are currently doing. Also, an appeal in our legal case with Novell has been filed in the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the court has also approved our desire to fast-track the appeal. This means we could have a resolution to our appeal several months earlier than would have otherwise been the case.

In order to continue to support and maintain both our current and older versions of our UNIX operating systems, SCO announced price increases of legacy, obsolete versions of OpenServer and UnixWare. Unlike many companies, SCO is committed to making legacy products available to customers to protect their technology investments. The most current versions of SCO’s UNIX, OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7.1.4, will maintain their current pricing. With the exception of upgrades and trade-ins for OpenServer 5.0.7, prices will also be unchanged.

We recognize the importance of continuing to provide updates and support to legacy systems. In order to do so, these cost increases are necessary to continue to provide quality products. With that said, we have now unified the prices for upgrades and trade-in’s which now reflect a list price decrease when moving to OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7.1.4. SCO OpenServer and SCO UnixWare remain very competitive, with significant average lifetime use of the products and a licensing model that requires no annual maintenance fees.

We encourage you to upgrade to the latest versions of OpenServer and UnixWare to take advantage of hardware certifications as well as the increased performance capabilities. For more details regarding this pricing change, please see the formal announcement at http://ir.sco.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=361470

Finally, we have seen an increase in the number of customers who, after internal audits, have found a need to “true up” their SCO UNIX licenses. In light of this, we have announced a “True Up” licensing program that will provide customers discounted pricing for a limited time. Partners who identify customers who need to “true-up” their UNIX licenses can contact their SCO sales representative for specific details and possible discounts. For more information and details about the True Up licensing program, refer to the details below in the partner newsletter.

Thank you again for your continued support. As always, I welcome any feedback you have.

Best Regards,




Jeff Hunsaker
President and Chief Operating Officer
SCO Operations