OT: Microsoft buys stake in company tying Linux to Windows

[Tony Ryder]

Microsoft buys stake in company tying Linux to Windows
John Fontana, Network World

18/11/2004 08:00:33

Microsoft this week came as close at it may ever get to supporting Unix and
Linux when it took a minority stake in integration vendor Vintela.

Vintela has been cranking out software over the past few months to extend
Windows-based authentication, management and monitoring capabilities to
Unix, Linux and Macintosh operating systems.

Vintela currently has some 50 customers, mostly among Fortune 500 companies
with diverse internal networks. Vintela is currently the only vendor
producing such integration technology that links Windows and competing
platforms. Experts, however, say another handful of vendors are in stealth
mode and will hit the market shortly.

Neither Microsoft nor Vintela would reveal the size of the investment,
although sources said it was less than US$10 million. Privately held Vintela
plans to seek another round of funding early next year with an eye toward
expanding research and development, sales and support services.

In addition to the infusion of capital, the pair also agreed to a set of
commercial agreements that will have Microsoft providing Tier 1 support for
corporate customers. The agreements also include licensing for a series of
undisclosed Windows protocols that will tie Vintela's products more tightly
to Microsoft's infrastructure software.

"We are able to integrate with Microsoft at a deeper level. It is no longer
service integration; we are getting deep," says Chris Skillings, CEO and
co-founder of Vintela. "When you fire up a Vintela product it looks like a
Microsoft product. It is very well integrated."

The irony is that Vintela's product set grew out of intellectual property
the founders acquired from Caldera, which sued Microsoft for anti-trust
violations related to the desktop operating system DR-DOS. Microsoft and
Caldera settled in 2000.

Vintela over the past month has introduced four integration products that
tie Microsoft features to the Linux, Unix and Macintosh platforms.

The latest, Vintela Systems Manager, unveiled this week and slated to ship
early next year, allows Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 users to
extend its management and monitoring capabilities to Unix, Linux, and
Macintosh OS X systems. Using MOM, IT administrators can manage those
platform resources from the existing MOM administrator, operator, and Web
consoles as well as the MOM reporting mechanism.

In September, the company introduced Vintela Group Policy (VGP), which
extends the group policy features of Active Directory to Unix and Linux
desktops and servers. The tool helps administrators create a consistent set
of configuration policies for computers and manage those from a centralized
console.

In August, the company shipped Vintela Management Extensions (VMX) 1.0, a
set of components for Microsoft's System Management Server 2003 that provide
discovery, inventory, distribution, reporting and remote features for
managing servers and desktops regardless of platform.

In May, Vintela introduced Vintela Authentication Services (VAS), which
allow authentication of Unix and Linux systems through Active Directory.


Regards
Tony Ryder
Computer Logic
Phn: 07 3279 1922
Fax: 07 3279 0532
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