SCO Forum
SCO Forum was a technical computer conference sponsored by the Santa Cruz Operation, briefly by Caldera International, and later The SCO Group that took place during the 1980s through 2000s. It was held annually, most often in August of each year, and typically lasted for much of a week. From 1987 through 2001 it was held in Santa Cruz, California, on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The scenic location, amongst redwood trees and overlooking Monterey Bay, was considered one of the major features of the conference. From 2002 through 2008 it was held in Las Vegas, Nevada, at one of several hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. Despite the name and location changes, the conference was considered to be the same entity, with both the company and attendees including all instances in their counts of how many ones they had been to.
During the keynote addresses for the Santa Cruz conferences, SCO would present its vision of the direction of the computer industry and how its products fit into that direction. There were then many highly technical breakout sessions and "birds of a feather" discussions where SCO operating systems and other technologies were explained in detail and customers and partners could engage SCO engineers regarding them. Typically some – attendees came to each Forum. Due to its useful content and to its relaxed, fun atmosphere, the Santa Cruz Forum became known as one of the best such conferences to go to in the industry. It was the largest tech event in the Santa Cruz area and made a multi-million dollar impact on the local economy.
During the Las Vegas years, Forum was used to convey the SCO Group's side in the SCO–Linux disputes. It was also used to showcase the company's efforts to revitalize its operating system business and to get into new business areas.
SCO in Santa Cruz years
Aims
The goal of SCO Forum was to spread the company's message and inform its users and partners as to the capabilities and technical characteristics of its products and express optimism about the future path of the company. Representatives from SCO included executives, product managers, development engineers, and others. Attendees from outside SCO included value-added resellers, channel distributors, application developers, and computer manufacturers.Forum helped establish a community around SCO, where people reinforced each other in believing that using Unix as a basis for business solutions – by no means a given in those days – was the correct approach, and that SCO provided the right products from both a technical and business aspect to do so.
As such, SCO Forum was considered a popular and very successful event. As Dr. Dobb's Journal later wrote, "SCO Forum was the place to be if you were a Unixhead."
With SCO having built a successful business with its Unix-on-commodity-hardware offering, Forum was used by the company to argue why new competitors in the space, such as Univel and SunSoft, would not be successful. In later years, when Unix itself came under threat, first from Microsoft's Windows NT and then from open source Linux, it was a role of Forum to stress that Unix was not going away and that business success could still be had with it. As SCO CEO Doug Michels said at Forum 1999, "In spite of all the rumors and opinions that Unix would end, it didn't."
New deals between SCO and other companies in the industry were often announced at Forum.
Alternatively, panel discussions were held to discuss the state of already existing partnerships, such as one for Project Monterey, the strategic importance of which was given much attention at the time. Company slogans were advanced, such as "the Internet Way of Computing". On the other hand, failed initiatives announced at previous events, such as SCO's involvement in the Advanced Computing Environment, were explained away as quickly as possible.
History
The first conference took place in 1987; it was referred to as the SCO XENIX 386 Developer Conference. SCO was looking for a place to hold an event that would bring together developers to exchange ideas, and the university said that it could provide such a spot in late August, before students returned to campus for the fall quarter.By August 1988, the trade publication InfoWorld was mentioning "SCO Forum '88, a conference for Xenix developers." However, unlike the previous years' Forum, this one was not restricted to developers, with resellers invited as well as part of SCO's effort to build a strong reseller base. The conference featured an announcement from SCO partner AT&T about a merged Unix and Xenix OS product.
SCO Forum '89 was also reported on in InfoWorld as well as in PC Week. It was held during August 21–25, as was promoted ahead of time by Newsbytes News Network. It featured third-party vendors announcing new releases of their products. In particular, an agreement with Microsoft to support Word and related products on SCO systems was highlighted. Speakers at Forum '89 included Paul Maritz of Microsoft and Ray Noorda of Novell as well as the company's two founders, Larry Michels and Doug Michels.
Both the company and the conference underwent growth. SCO held other technical and marketing events and seminars during the year and around the world, but Forum was certainly the largest of them. Advertisements for Forum stressed the value attending it would hold for a wide range of industry people – executives, managers, hardware developers, software developers, resellers, distributors, dealers, third-party vendors, and end users, as well as journalists and industry analysts, with session tracks available for each of these audiences.
With the company showing some profitable quarters, anticipating going public, and holding a roughly 75 percent share in the small-to-medium-sized businesses market, SCO Forum92 saw people in attendance, a big jump of about twice the previous year's total. From a third to a half of the attendees were from overseas, reflecting the company's worldwide success. Among these were about thirty attendees from formerly communist Eastern Bloc states.
Advertisements for Forum93 tried to give the conference an almost academic flavor, billing as it an "International Open Systems Symposium", making reference to the open systems movement then popular. Courses were said to be available in certain "majors" and upon completion would result in the attendee earning a certificate of completion from SCO. But the tenor of the week was set by SCO chief executive Lars Turndal's opening keynote address, where he attempted to soothe anxieties related to the company's past year of management shakeups and poor stock performance.
Image:SCO Forum 1998 Roger McGuinn performing at Cowell College.jpg|thumb|left|Timeless music, timeless setting: Roger McGuinn performing an evening concert on the patio of Cowell College at SCO Forum98, with Monterey Bay in the background
By 1994, Forum was on UNIX Reviews recommended list of shows and conferences for readers to attend, and in a survey of events they characterized it as one of "the industry's leading-edge trade shows".
An increase in technically-oriented, future-focused content was noted for Forum94. Forum94 had one of the more celebrated demonstrations, that of SCO's back-end role in the creation of PizzaNet, which enabled computer users for the first time to order pizza delivery from their local Pizza Hut restaurant via the Internet. That year's conference also witnessed what is said to have been the first-ever scheduled live music concert to be broadcast across the Internet, in an August 23 performance by local band Deth Specula on the Mbone.
SCO had been an original co-sponsor of the UniForum association of Unix users and had long had a close relationship with it. By 1996 attendees to Forum were given a trial membership in UniForum. And by Forum98 there was an explicit UniForum track of breakout sessions available.
In some cases gatherings at Forum led to industry initiatives taking place, such as the 86open effort to form consensus on a common binary file format for x86-based Unix and Unix-like operating systems, which had its initial meeting at SCO's Santa Cruz offices on the final day of Forum97.
Peak Forum attendance was in 1997 and 1998, when about people attended each event. Some 60 different countries were represented.
| Software developer | 27% |
| Distributor | 22% |
| SCO reseller | 17% |
| Computer manufacturer | 15% |
| Hardware developer | 12% |
| Systems integrator | 3% |
| Trainer | 3% |
| Internet service provider | 1% |
Forum often featured individuals and groups who came year after year, viewing it as something of an annual pilgrimage and reunion. One such group was of developers and resellers in the United States who qualified for the SCO Advanced Product Center designation. After first getting together at a "birds of a feather" session at Forum in 1989, they formed an association known as APC Open in 1990, that was renamed to APC International in 1998 and iXorg in 2000. Another such attendee was Dupaco, the founder of which attended every Forum from the beginning and built a multi-million dollar business with SCO Xenix and later products while becoming the sole distributor of SCO products in the Netherlands.
Many writers considered SCO Forum to be unique in the industry.
As a Dataquest columnist said, "It was a veritable treat. Set amidst the verdant redwood trees at the... campus, it was a Unix feast that lasted for five Californian summer days."
An industry observer for eWeek recalled that both Forum and the company Santa Cruz Operation itself had "reflected the ethos of the community for which it was named" and that "based in the college/beach town of Santa Cruz, Calif., epitomized an industry culture gone."
And as one ZDNet writer stated, "SCO Forum... is like no conference or industry confab you'll ever attend. Part pep rally, part study session, part sales pitch, and part schmoozefest, Forum has a far different atmosphere than any conventional trade show."