Vintela Investment for Unix Integration

Vintela, an ISV that makes products that integrate Unix and Linux with Windows, has received a nondisclosed but noncontrolling investment from Microsoft. The companies also signed a broad agreement under which Microsoft will support certain Vintela products and Vintela will license some Windows protocols. This agreement positions Vintela as Microsoft’s prime partner for integrating Windows and Microsoft’s management products with Unix and Linux.

Current Vintela Products

Vintela is a Utah-based spin-off of Caldera, a Unix vendor that later purchased SCO and adopted SCO’s name. Vintela’s mission is “to be the premier provider of easily deployed software solutions that enable business users of Unix, Linux, Java, and Mac OS X systems to interoperate with Windows-based systems.” The company has five products either shipping or in beta that could be of interest to organizations that are Windows-centric but employ clients or servers running those other systems, as follows:

Vintela Authentication Services (VAS) allows computers running AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Red Hat Linux, and SuSE Linux to authenticate themselves and their users directly against a Windows Active Directory (AD). With VAS, each user can have a single AD account, password, and set of group memberships that provide the basis for Kerberos authentication and authorization on both Windows and VAS-equipped non-Windows computers. Without it, users would require separate accounts for Windows and the other systems, and administrators would need a directory-integration solution such as Microsoft’s Integration Server to synchronize passwords and other account data among systems.