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Microsoft to release SFU 3.0 version

Syed Amin Jafri in Hyderabad

Microsoft Corporation has announced that Version 3.0 of its Services for UNIX (SFU 3.0) will be available in the market by the end of the second quarter of this financial year.

In a statement on Thursday, Microsoft India Development Centre managing director Srini Koppolu said, "SFU 3.0 is the first in a series of complete products that are being developed by the India Development Centre (at Hyderabad)."

"The SFU is a breakthrough version that provides seamless movement between UNIX and Windows for effective co-existence in a heterogeneous work environment, as well as a powerful set of tools for smooth migration to Windows-2000," according to S Somasegar, corporate vice-president, Windows Engineering Services and Solutions division of Microsoft.

The product provides a full UNIX environment that runs on the Windows kernel, which allows Windows and UNIX applications to run on a single system. This would lower the total cost of IT systems ownership by enabling customers to consolidate diverse platforms.

With SFU 3.0, users can access files seamlessly between machines running Windows and UNIX using the product's Network File System.

The integration provided by SFU 3.0 also allows users to select the best environment for the work at hand without any significant staff retraining or re-programming of custom applications, thus reducing both costs and time.

Software vendors with UNIX applications in the market can widen their products' reach through the SFU 3.0 since this level of integration between these traditionally rival platforms would also allow UNIX applications to run on Windows without changing their original UNIX code base.

"We know customers that have existing UNIX investments which are at the end of their life cycle or that want to move off UNIX to lower IT costs. SFU 3.0 helps customers address these concerns," Somasegar pointed out.

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