Linux insignia software

GraphOn to Beta NT Thin Client Software

By William Fellows

GraphOn Corp will put its thin client Windows NT software out to beta at the end of June and expects to ship a shrink-wrapped product by year-end. The Campbell, California-based Citrix Systems Inc wannabe says it hasn't decided what to call the technology it acquired from Corel Corp last year in return for 25% of its equity. Corel called it JBridge, and while names such as Go-Anywhere to echo the names of GraphOn's other products have been bandied around, the company says the jury is still out on that one. JBridge delivers 32-bit Windows apps from an NT server to any client running a Java virtual machine. It will take from now to year-end to finish substituting Corel's protocols - Corel "mistakenly" designed JBridge for use with large clients - for GraphOn's own X-Windows-based RapidX protocol, which it claims is faster than Citrix's ICA. GraphOn's other connectivity products, Go-Between, Go-Global and Go-Joe, enable Unix and Linux applications to run on any desktop using RapidX. In addition to delivering applications through a JVM, GraphOn says that when complete the software will also support native Windows and ActiveX front ends.

GraphOn is reversing into shell company, Unity First Acquisition to get itself a stock market listing, which it expects to happen around the end of June. Meantime a federal court has thrown out Citrix's request for a declaratory judgement that the IP it acquired when it bought Insignia Solutions Inc technology for $17m last year does not misappropriate GraphOn's intellectual property. It's only got a couple of weeks left to appeal. When Insignia was looking to buy GraphOn back in 1996, it was forced to sign an NDA on technology GraphOn was developing. The acquisition didn't go through, but GraphOn reportedly got wind that Insignia was going to develop its own Go-Global Unix-to-thin client lookalike.

GraphOn's software, now part of Sun Microsystems Inc's I-PLANet remote network application access suite, is also jumping on another of Sun's bandwagons - ASP application service provision - and expects to feature in Sun reseller Abcom's forthcoming Web Harbor ASP initiative. This is strictly a Unix play as NT does not yet offer the scalability or robustness required by ASPs.