Europe turns to Unix One UK company believes in Unix sufficiently to market and support only Unix products

by KATHY LAWRENCE

ith W the number of operating systems for small systems be- ing advocated at the moment,

it takes a brave person to put their entire faith in one system. Such a person is Dr Pamela Geisler, who left Zilog to set up Sphinx, a UK com- pany marketing an entirely Unix-

based product line. Geisler believes that Unix will be-

come a standard in the same way that Q/M was a standard two or three

years ago. ‘Thinking that the world was going that way it seemed like a great opportunity’ she said.

In fact, the actual move to Unix has been slower than she envisaged. ‘Every major manufacturer has now

declared for Unix in one way or another’ she said. ‘They have shown

Pamela Geisler places her faith in Unix.

their hands earlier than expected, but the move to hardware takes a long

time, because the organizations are so huge. NCR’s whole product line will be based on Unix, but the company has to gear up a factory, and resolve questions like: Shall we manufacture in the USA or the UK? Which factory shall we use?’

This slow move towards Unix has made life difficult for Sphinx. ‘We had to spread our risks. We now have three sales divisions: Unix software, consultancy and training, and net- worked products.’ The software has been slow to take off, but its growth has been steady, despite sales lower than forecast. The market is still very fragmented with lots of- different machines and different products.

‘The consultancy side grew very fast, and is constrained only by the number of people we can hire to do a job. The last consultant we took on hasn’t been seen yet as he was out on the first day. The consultants are booked six months up to a year ahead.’

On the networked products side there has been one big sale, and then nothing much more.

Altogether Sphinx is operating be- low its original revenue target levels. Geisler has slowed the growth of the company accordingly. It was due to go into profit in July 1984 for the first time though, three months ahead of plan.

Initial investment in Sphinx, set up in May 1983, was &400000, an unusu- ally high amount for such a company. Olivetti joined in the second round of financing late in 1983, and further funds have been gleaned from the

USA, where Sphinx is just setting up an office.

The IJSA is far ahead of Europe in taking to Unix, says Geisler. ‘AT&T is an American company, so everyone immediately identifies with it. All the universities took Unix from AT&T. There isn’t the same burning interest over here, but in the USA there are Unix and c people scattered all over the place. Most of the Unix-based hardware comes from the States ori- ginally too.’

In Europe the UK is ahead of the rest in turning to Unix, says Geisler. ‘The rest of Europe is about a year behind the UK. But France has a special position, because of Thomp-

son and Fortune. Even Siemens, Nixdorf and Triumph Adler in Ger- many have announced ITnix-based products.’

Sphinx is extending its business beyond the USA and the most imme- diate Eluropean countries. It has shipped software into the Middle East, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Sales of software products are going well in Scandinavia. Sphinx now hals one dealer in the Middle East, and plans to set up more in France and Germany.

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Versions of Unix

One of the problems hampering Unix’s growth is the multitude of different versions of Unix available, both for historic reasons and because hardware manufacturers tend to change the software to suit their hardware. Geisler believes the Unix- type system providers are getting closer together though. AT&T are pushing System V very hard as the standard she says. Microsoft made commercial additions to Unix and offered it to hardware manufacturers, such as Altos and Tandy, and works with Logica in Europe, for com- panies such as Siemens and Triumph Adler. A year from now that system will be System V compatible, with some added-on extras, she predicts.

There will be problems with chang- ing the Unix system that Microsoft provides to tie in more closely with System V. ‘Tandy has about 50000 machines installed. If Tancy moves to System V it will have to update the software on all those machines. This has to be a planned progression, so as not to wreck its software investment.’

The other versions of Unix avail- able differ mainly in how they handle shared data with several users - record or file locking - and how they handle networking.

Sphinx supports all these versions on one machine or another, which is necessary if it is to be an efficient marketing umbrella for all Unix soft- ware products. From this position Geisler can see the path that must be trodden to increase compatibility and make Unix a more viable product to commercial users. ‘We need a stand- ard for Unix. We need a standard for c variations in C compilers. We need a cut-down version, a single-user version. People want to have their own machine, which they can link to a network, while preserving the com- patibility of their applications soft- ware.’

Plans afoot in the Unix world include a possible Apple Lisa inter-

face and AT&T has announced an icon interface and mouse support eventually. Software houses will con- tinue to have problems keeping up with the versions of Unix. ‘The whole world is hoping they’ll stop at V’ says Geisler.

Applications software

As a marketing organization, Sphinx sees a lot of the software being pro- duced for the Unix marketplace. Geis- ler admits that so far there’s not much, and it’s rather boring. ‘Look at the IBM PC. It has some very exciting products’ she says. This is partly because the number shipped of IBM PCs makes it worthwhile for software writers to produce good products for that machine, and partly because they can use the functionality of the hard- ware, in graphics applications for example. With Unix though, there is very little other than word processing, database management and other very basic software. ‘There’s not much vertical software and almost nothing clever or unusual. Many of the cre- ative programmes are working on the IBM PC or games - high volume stuff. When Unix becomes a high volume product this may change. At the moment you know you program in c for Unix, but you don’t know what hardware to aim at .’

In an effort to find some really good Unix applications software, Sphinx has cosponsored an award in the UK for products of excellence. Geisler said at the time of the announcement of this unusual award, ‘There is still a dearth of application products of all kinds running under Unix. For PC/ DOS the number of software pro- ducts available from third party soft- ware product vendors is in excess of 50000. The number of similar pro- ducts available under Unix has not yet reached the 100 mark.’

support

A criticism often aimed at AT&T is

its lack of support facilities for Unix. This is now changing. ‘In the USA it’s getting very good’ says Geisler. ‘AT&T offers full training in almost every city. They have hotline tele- phone and have started advertising campaigns. I presume they’ll do something similar in Europe.’

In the meantime though, anyone with a large investment in Unix, such as software houses, buys the source code and supports it inhouse. If they run into trouble they have to go back to the States and AT&T. Or if they got the system through a supplier like Microsoft or Unisoft, they go back to them.

Geisler expects the market to grow until everyone is involved. ‘At the moment we have bits. There are system houses, large companies such as Barratt which have decided to go the Unix route, and hardware dealers that have taken up Unix as manufac- turers move from CP/M to Unix. There are small end users who are getting reasonably priced multiuser machines, such as the Fortune. Often customers are people with big Unix plans, who are just starting off. In a year or two that same company may be buying systems by the hundreds.’ Geisler puts the number of installed Unix systems in the UK at present at about 6000. She expects that to more than double by the end of the year. This she compares with the USA where, depending on whether Unix goes onto the IBM PC, predictions are for between 150000 and 200000 in- stalled Unix systems by the end of 1984.

Sphinx seems to have the Unix market well worked out. The com- pany exists now mostly on training other people in Unix and encouraging them to produce good applications software. As that software is produced Sphinx will take it, port it to a variety of machines, and market it worldwide on behalf of the authors. If Unix ever does take off in Europe as well as it has in the States, Sphinx will be ready and waiting. 0

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