UnXis completes purchase of SCO Unix assets

UnXis is committed to investing $25m over the next 18 months into product and technology developments, as well as building upon its world-class management, sales and customer support team. UnXis has retained all customer contracts, the UNIX and UNIXWARE trademarks and an installed base of 32,000 customer contracts maintained in 82 countries, including McDonald's, Siemens, Sperbank, China Post, Thomson Reuters and the US Department of Defense.

UnXis, Inc is owned jointly by Stephen Norris, previous co-founder of the Carlyle Group and MerchantBridge, a leading international private equity group with diverse interests operating from offices in the United Kingdom, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. MerchantBridge has completed nine private equity transactions in the past five years, with an enterprise value of $4.5bn.

UnXis has appointed Richard A. Bolandz as CEO. Over the past twenty years, Bolandz has lead competitive strategy, corporate development and technology commercialization at organizations including Qwest Communications MCI Communications and UNISYS Global Outsourcing & Infrastructure Services.

Richard A. Bolandz, CEO of unXis commented today: "Our first commitment is to our customers, value added resellers and channel partners to support their existing needs as well as a whole new generation of hardware, software and trends of the cloud."

Eric le Blan, Vice Chairman of unXis and COO of MerchantBridge, continued by saying: "The acquisition of this exciting business is opening up vast opportunities within the IT sector and unXis is strategically positioned to aggressively grow in the coming months. We are delighted to announce that the entire staff of The SCO Group has accepted employment with unXis, Inc, and I thank them for their enthusiastic backing as well as SCO customers for their support. With the continuity provided by the team and the active role played by key customers, together with the expertise of the partners that we are bringing on board, we are strategically positioned to provide the most reliable, secure and scalable operating systems in such diverse environments as global cloud computing enterprises and small and medium-size businesses; such is the flexibility of our software solutions. We foresee our software becoming a critical component of the new Internet highways currently being developed in the Middle and Far East, from Riyadh to Beijing."

Under the new vision, unXis will focus on 3 immediate priorities:

- Industry-Leading Technology
Harnessing the unmatched reliability, scalability and security of Unix, the company has a dedicated vision to serve small and medium-size businesses, enterprise and OEM customers through development of a new generation of hardware, software and cloud computing.
- Collaborative Operating Model
The company is committed to collaborating with each customer across SCO's vast footprint across 82 countries to provide the best, customizable technology solution and support to drive their business forward.

- Best and Brightest Talent
The company is making an enormous investment in talent with some key strategic hires as well as doubling resources in engineering, technical support and customer relationship management.

"With today's completion of the acquisition, we have cleared the way for the rebirth of the Unix operating system that for nearly 30 years has reliably powered mission-critical information systems around the globe. With the purchase of these valuable assets complete, we can now focus 100 percent of our attention on bringing state-of-the-art technology capabilities to the Unix platform, improving customer service and support, whilst capitalizing on the robust and secure SCO Unix operating system for today's cloud-based systems." concluded Bolandz.