SCO a reçu 100 millions de Microsoft

Selon cet article de SlashDot, un employé de SCO aurait envoyé à Eric S. Raymond un mémo interne qui aurait circulé à travers SCO.

Le mémo explique la stratégie de SCO vs ses clients, Microsoft, RedHat et Novell. Ils ont déjà obtenus un total d'environ 100 millions de $ US de la part de Microsoft, à travers de compagnies tierces (pour éviter l'anti-thrust). Ils souhaitent poursuivre Novell sur IPX, RedHat pour Acrylis et Microsoft par la suite.. en espérant être achetés!

Une copie du mémo, dont l'original est disponible à ce lien, est dans les détails :

En gras les passages importants, en italique les commentaires.

--- From the mailbox of chris sontag

From: Mike Anderer
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003
To: csontag@sco.com
CC: Bob Bench
Subject: Conversation Friday

Chris Sontag, the recipient of this mail, is Vice-President and general manager of the SCOsource, responsible for (as his company page puts it) overseeing the development and licensing of SCO's immense intellectual property holdings..

Chris:

I know you were going totalk to Bob later Friday, but I figured I would
outline the issues.

Bob Bench is is the Chief Financial Officer of the SCO group. He is in the Cc line.

Mike Anderer is a consultant with an outfit called S2 that bills itself as a Strategic Consulting firm, in their M&A group. His name is in SCO's SEC filings.

1) Baystar is easy as they were just a Microsoft referral and would be 2%

Baystar Capital is a venture-capital firm. In 2003 SCO got about fifty million dollars from them in a deal that was rumored to have Microsoft's hand behind it. This confirms the rumor.

2) Any licensing deal would be at 5%

3) Much of the other work would go from 2% to 3% as I have engaged in
direct, but this would require according to Bob either Darl or you
signing off on the fact that this ane was not a referral.

4) On the patent side for IPX, where foes that fit it. I am working
with the lawyers to get these moved from provisional to more complete in
the next week. I think it will spawn at least 3 patents. Ed and I are
the inventors on these. What do we fo here

This is mysterious. IPX is a network stack developed by Novell. The implication is that Mike Anderer thinks SCO might be able to get a patent lock on it, so they were looking for IP leverage against Novell.

5) The RedHat, Acrylis examiniation, there is no upside here is this

billable seperatly. I bought a PC and loaded up RedHat and will take
that over and work through it with the Lawfirm. What do we do here?

Acrylis is a company that Caldera (which became SCO) partnered with in 2001. The ongoing lawsuit between Red Hat and SCO is documented here.

I realize the last negotiations are not as much fun, but Microsoft will
have brough in $86 million for us including Baystar. The next deal we
should be able to get from $16-20, but it will be brutial as it is for
go to makerket work and some licences. I know we can do this , if
everyone stays on board and still wants to do a deal. I just want to
get this deal and move away from corp dev and out into the marketing
andfield dollars....In this market we can get $3-5 million in
incremental deals and not have to go through the gauntlet which will get
tougher next week with the SR VP's.

This is the smoking gun. We now know that Microsoft raised at least $86 million for SCO, but according to the SCO conference call this morning (03 Mar 2004) their cash reserves were $68.5 million. If not for Microsoft, SCO would be at least $15 million in debt today.

The "$16 to $20" is almost certainly $16 to $20 million, and since this memo is five months old that deal is almost certainly completed by now. This means it's possible SCO has burned through as much as $30 million in just a year of barratry.

The part that starts I just want is interesting, too. It looks as though Anderer is talking about shopping for a wealthier patron group within Microsoft's corporate hierarchy; SCO has been taking money from Microsoft corp dev (probably corporate development) but the gauntlet of Microsoft's senior vice-presidents is about to make that more difficult. He thinks they can get more money from marketing and field dollars, whatever that is (later paragraphs suggest it's a different group within Microsoft).

We should line up some small acquisitions here to jump start this if we
do it. We shoudl also do this ASAP. Microsoft also indicated there was
a lot more money out there and they would clearly rather use Baystar
"like" entities to help us get signifigantly more money if we want to
grow further or do acquisitions

In other words, Microsoft wanted to funnel its anti-Linux payoff through third parties. Maybe in case the antitrust guys at the Department of Justice happen not to be asleep at the switch?

The bit about acquisitions seems more ominous when you remember that Caldera/SCO has a long history of lawsuits over obsolete technologies stripped out of dead companies — starting with DR-DOS from Digital Research and continuing through USL's System V into the present with the IBM lawsuit.

This Microsoft deal is the Ante to the poker game...We should get this
done and go after several $2-3 Million deals from the expense side of
their company.

So their revenue plan for the future is to hit Microsoft up for money, then hit them up for more money.

The will help us a lot and if we execute we could exit and Unix
componients we have build potentially back to Microsoft or MCS.

I think they are on track and may not be able to push much more this
round, but there are other ways to get money from them, their partners,
investment bank referrals, etc..

Do kepp in mind that they have brough us between $82 million and $86
million if this deal is between $4million per quarter where Rich is at,
or it turns into %5 million wjich is the lowest number Chris had
interest in.

Rich, in context, must be whoever at Microsoft Corporate Development was responsible for haggling with Chris (Sontag) over the magnitude of SCO's payoffs.

The "Ante to the poker game" is the $16-$20 million deal that was current at the time the memo was written. The $82-86 million had already been delivered. Together, they're counting on between $98,000,000 and $106,000,000 from Microsoft's corporate development division alone...

There will be more, lons, partnerships, etc..but we need to just get
this one done. It is too high profile, it is also critical, but they
are not the people to pitch. We should get what we can from them ad
then work the other and larger areas of the company and groups where
they have real budget and need for our help.

...and $100 million is before they hit up the rest of Microsoft.

Let me know your thoughts.

-Mike

Whitewhip.. tes peurs étaient fondées!

Dernière modification le 04/03/2004 @ 14:16 par Drizzt