Sun to bundle NetDynamics app server with Solaris By Dana Gardner InfoWorld Electric Posted at 4:07 PM PT, Oct 21, 1998 Borrowing a few ideas from Netscape Communications and Microsoft, Sun Microsystems laid out a strategy Wednesday that emphasizes the concept of building enterprise Web portals aided by tightening integration between its new NetDynamics application server with its flagship server operating system, Solaris. Like Microsoft, which sees little distinction between its Windows NT Server operating system and the services that amount to an application server, Sun -- beginning immediately -- will offer add-on bundle deals that put its recently acquired NetDymanics Server on Solaris -- and at a 20 percent discount. Unlike Microsoft, however, Sun will price its popular Unix operating system separately from its application server "forever," said Alan Baratz, president of Sun's Java Software division in a conference call to journalists and analysts Wednesday. "Sun will ensure that Solaris is competitive, with the functions needed to be successful, and application server capability is a part of that," Baratz said. With the news of the bundles, Sun appears to be walking a tricky line between emulating Microsoft's direct OS-to-app server integration but also being mindful that many other application server vendors have ported their competing server wares to the Solaris platform. Sun is also the license owner and driving force behind the Java and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) efforts, which many application server vendors -- including Oracle, IBM, Netscape, and BEA -- subscribe to and support. Sun is seeking to maintain a "church/state" separation between Java development and other Sun product development by keeping them as separate divisions within the overall corporation. As an offering of its cross-platform intentions, Sun emphasized that the NetDynamics server -- which will emerge in a major upgrade version early next year with EJB 1.0 support -- also runs on Windows NT, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and SGI Irix, according to Zack Rinat, vice president of NetDynamics at Java Software. The server will be optimized for all those platforms -- including Solaris, Rinat said, adding that variants of Unix tend to scale higher than Windows NT. To better compete with IBM CICS and BEA's Tuxedo, Sun also announced Wednesday that it will license Inprise's VisiBroker Integrated Transaction Service, an object-oriented transaction processing monitor. Already, NetDynamics includes Inprise's VisiBroker object request broker. In the future, NetDynamics plans to integrate the object transaction monitor capabilities into its offerings, the company said. Lastly, in banter reminiscent of Netscape's portal-as-enterprise-services-hub marketing, Baratz laid out a portal vision that uses Sun's family of products to help companies create a federation of Web sites. Such sites would be centrally and seamlessly linked so that its employees and partners could quickly and easily get to the applications and information they need -- regardless of where they are and regardless of where the information originates or resides. "Portals are becoming the core of the enterprise computing environment. That's what it's all about," Baratz said. "At Sun, we are building an employee portal, so that with a browser I can access a site that gives me e-mail, calendaring, news of the day, access to Web-based content on products, and pricing -- but all browser-based on the front end and linking into an installed base." "It's a portal for Sun Microsystems. And I can access it from my PC at home, at an airport kiosk, a customer site -- anywhere there's the Internet," Baratz said. Consequently, Sun is assembling an integrated core family of products -- including sundry Java IDE tools, NetDynamics Studio, Java Web Server, Java Embedded Server, Sun Messaging Server, Solaris, and NetDynamics -- to allow enterprises to build their own portals. Calling it "the most complete software in the enterprise," Sun is positioning "NetDynamics as the power behind the portal, and the portal is emerging as the new enterprise software model," Baratz said. "NetDynamics is the overarching brand for all these products, and the focus is on the vision of Internet-based computing," Rinat said. "Java is an enabling technology and NetDynamics will be the platform for integrating." Sun Microsystems Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., is at www.sun.com. Dana Gardner is an editor at large at InfoWorld. From MAILER-DAEMON@cs.depaul.edu Mon Nov 9 13:40:16 1998