New Moon on Monday for Tarantella

Tarantella has bought privately-held New Moon Systems in a bid to offer both Unix and Windows applications on a server-based computing model.

Privately-held New Moon will cost Tarantella, previously a division of Unix-vendor SCO, around $4m in stock plus a guaranteed amount in royalties over the next two years.

Doug Michels, Tarantella CEO, told silicon.com: "The bottom line is that Tarantella has been very successful at the high end but we've discovered there's a lot of demand at the lower end - and that even includes divisions of larger companies where there is little or no Unix expertise."

New Moon has made its way by targeting SMEs with its Canaveral iQ product that extends the capabilities of Microsoft Windows Terminal Services.

Max Herrmann, New Moon VP marketing and strategy, said: "The beauty of this acquisition is that we both competed against Citrix but not each other."

The fat server-thin client model of computing has proved successful for market-leader Citrix, despite the late 1990s hype about the 'death of the PC' proving premature.

Michels said Tarantella has been walking away from "a huge number of deals" just because it wasn't addressing lower end needs. Both companies now expect the launch of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to give them a boost, even though it ships with some integrated terminal services.

Citrix, Tarantella and others have long touted the benefits of centralised management associated with server-based computing and Michels said the downturn has accelerated adoption.

"The value proposition of server-based computing has real economic wind," he added.