Licking its wounds, Citrix regroups next week at its Thinergy Conference in Florida. But ahead of that Tarantella chose this week to crank up the pressure another notch by releasing Version 3.0.

This, the company's Peter Bondar tells us, involves a complete rewrite rather than minor adjustments. He says it now supports ten times the number of users, and 50 per cent less CPU time, so that 600 users can hang off a 700Mhz server, bargaining for 6Mb of RAM per user.

Of course apple-for-apple (or even lemon-for-lemon) comparisons with Citrix only go so far, as Tarantella sits in the middle of a three tier plan, sitting between the client and the host application servers. Tarantella is really just a daemon that delivers and manages display information, with - the argument goes - the expense of deploying a specialist middle tier being offset by gains such as follow-me printing, saving state information and the ability to dispense with running terminal software elsewhere.

Version 3.0 also supports the latest version of the RDP protocol, 5.0, found in the Windows 2000 Server lines.

One thing Citrix can't claim to match is the ability to bounce jobs around server farms in different locations, which might be different countries, and manage them from one location.

Pricing stays the same, says Bondar, at £249 per concurrent user list. He says most of the business is on Solaris for now, although he expects the Linux side to grow, and Hitachi is to build a black-box network appliance server based on Linux that runs the Tarantella daemon. The software itself is slated to roll out on October 30. ®

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