MICROSOFT SPLITS NT INTO FOUR, RENAMES IT WINDOWS 2000.

Microsoft Corp prepared the way for next year's NT 5.0 launch yesterday by announcing the product's expected name change, and its plan to split it into four. NT 5.0 will henceforth be called Windows 2000, a change that signals, according to  Microsoft, its evolution into the mainstream. Some 20 million NT Workstation and 3 million NT Server licenses have shipped since the operating system was first launched back in 1993, and Redmond says it is now seeing sales run rates three times that of Unix and twice that of Novell NetWare. NT Workstation sales now account for around 20% of all of Microsoft's current desktop sales. Hewlett- Packard Co is claiming that over half of its Vectra corporate PCs are now shipping with NT Workstation 4.0. The Workstation product itself becomes Windows 2000 Professional under the new scheme, while the server products will be split into Server and Advanced Server (the old Enterprise Edition) packages. At the high-end Microsoft will introduce a new Datacenter edition. Eventually, the successor to Windows 98, currently unnamed, will be synchronized under the same naming scheme and sold as the consumer edition, but only once the old Windows code is replaced by NT code. Server will support up to two-way SMP symmetrical multiprocessing, wh ile Advanced Server will add cluster support along with the Convoy TCP/IP load balancing technology from Microsoft's recent Valence Research Inc acquisition (CI No 3,482), along with four-way SMP and support for up to 64Gb main memory. Brad Chase, VP of marketing for Microsoft's personal and business systems group, said that he didn't expect a material change in price between Advanced Server and the existing NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition. The new Datacenter edition takes SMP support up to 16-way, or 32-way for the OEM version, and will be further optimized to run large data warehouses, online transaction processing and technical computing. It will ship up to three months later than the other three Windows 2000 editions. When that will be is still not clear. Microsoft now says that the beta 3 of what was NT 5.0, originally expected to ship in November, is now set for the first quarter of next month. Using history as a guide, that means a further six to nine months before the final product is released. That could t ake us right to the end of 1999, and possibly into 2000 for the Datacenter Edition.