Excelan Inc of San Jose, California has stepped up its efforts to capture a slice of what it reckons is a booming Xenix networking market – even though we aren’t meant to talk about Xenix anymore now than AT&T says the latest releases can bear the Unix label with two extensions to its Lan Workplace […]
Excelan Inc of San Jose, California has stepped up its efforts to capture a slice of what it reckons is a booming Xenix networking market – even though we aren’t meant to talk about Xenix anymore now than AT&T says the latest releases can bear the Unix label with two extensions to its Lan Workplace family. The additions are a TCP/IP-based networking package for Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Xenix 386 and for the IBM PS/2 Models 70 and 80. And second, an upgrade enabling 80386-based AT-alikes to execute TCP/IP protocols under the new Santa Cruz Xenix System V Release 2.3 operating system. Despite the death of the Xenix brand name last month following Santa Cruz’s decision to adopt the Unix trademark for future releases of its 80386 operating systems, Neil Cook, north European regional sales manager for Excelan perversely maintains demand for Xenix will rise. The biggest issue is what percentage of the market share IBM’s OS/2 will take he stressed. Cook rates Xenix’s chances in the coming battle and while reluctant to forecast precise figures for the market carve-up, he is confident that Excelan will double its Xenix-related networking sales in the next six months. Excelan currently gets 60% of its sales from the MS-DOS and Xenix markets with the balance coming from the VMEbus customer base. Excelan’s new support of Santa Cruz Xenix 386 for the PS/2 enables users of 80386-based PS/2 models to run a complete suite of TCP/IP protocols and applications including network mail, terminal emulation, and file transfer so that they can talk to any of the various computer systems that support TCP/IP protocols. Lan WorkPlace for Xenix for PS/2 also supports Santa Cruz’s distributed file system, the Xenix/Net version of Microsoft’s MS Net, providing transparent resource sharing among Xenix workgroups and MS-DOS systems. Lan WorkPlace for Xenix also includes two programming interfaces, NetBIOS and a socket library, to assist software vendors in extending heterogeneous distributed applications to the PS/2 line. Excelan marketing vice-president Duane Murray underlined his company’s commitment to broad-based networking solutions. Our continuing relationship with Santa Cruz makes joint development projects like this possible, he said. Lots more flackery like that, but no prices were given.
