SCO's Unix and IP revenue dwindles

[Alpine]

Declining Unix revenue and falling "Mr Clean" sales continue to blight The SCO Group. During its third quarter, SCO posted just $9.4m in revenue - down from $11.2m in the same period last year. SCO then showed a net loss of $2.4m or a loss of 13 cents per share versus a net loss of $7.4m last year.

SCO now has $12.6m in cash and equivalents left to play with, along with $3.6m in an escrow account for its legal fees.

SCO's flagship Unix business accounted for $8m during the third quarter. That marks a massive drop from the $9m posted in the same period last year. The SCOsource - "we'll keep your Linux servers clean" - program performed much worse. Revenue dropped to, er, $32,000 from $678,000 in 2004. The market appears to be casting its lot in with IBM, Red Hat and Novell.

Major cuts have been made to SCO's marketing and R&D efforts as it tried to reduce overall expenses. Always the optimist, CEO Darl McBride spun a positive tale for the quarter.

"The third quarter was a productive quarter for SCO," he said. "Our Unix business operated profitably for the third consecutive quarter and we launched SCO OpenServer 6 which has received many favorable reviews and is showing traction with customers.

"Finally, we remain committed to pursuing our legal strategy in the courtroom and look forward to presenting our case in February 2007."


The REGister