Sun Microsystems is to give away a basic version of its Sun ONE
Application Server, in an effort to broaden the customer base for
its middleware products beyond companies running its own Solaris
operating system.
Sun said last month that it would bundle the Platform Edition of
its Sun ONE Application Server, version 7, with its newly released
Solaris 9.
This week's announcement means that, by the end of the year, the
product will also be available at no cost to customers running
Microsoft's Windows NT, Red Hat Linux, and Unix operating systems
from IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
Application servers provide a platform for deploying enterprise
applications, such as e-commerce software. They allow the
distribution of data to a variety of client devices or the building
Web portal sites. Sun is one of the smaller vendors in the market,
which is led by BEA Systems and IBM.
Sun said the move should allow customers to extend Web-based
applications to areas of their business where costs had otherwise
been prohibitively high. For example, a large retailer could deploy
the free application server at dozens of satellite stores, allowing
them to run a Web-based procurement application tied into the
retail company's central inventory management system.
Using IBM's published list prices, which do not take into account
any discounts, Sun claimed that customers could cut the cost of
deploying such a Web-based infrastructure by as much as two thirds.
However, such cost comparisons are hard to judge, because "each
vendor is going to twist it their own way," noted Shawn Willett, an
analyst with Current Analysis.
The Platform Edition of Sun's application server does not offer the
kind of administrative or high-availability features required for
important enterprise applications, he said.
Customers who need management software for monitoring and
administering applications remotely will have to buy the Standard
Edition, which will be priced at $2,000 (£1,340) per CPU, Sun said.
Those who need higher levels of reliability will need Sun's top-end
Enterprise Edition, priced at $10,000 (£6,700) per CPU, which adds
clustering technology.
The Platform and Standard editions of Sun ONE Application Server 7
for Solaris and Windows NT should be available in September, with
the Linux, HP-UX and AIX editions to follow by the end of the year,
Patrick Dorsey, group manager of Sun's Web and application server
products, said. General availability of the Enterprise version is
expected in the first quarter of 2003, he said.
The free Platform Edition includes a J2EE 1.3 server engine,
messaging software, support for Web services standards such as Soap
(Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description
Language), and an HTTP engine for basic Web server functions. It
does not include a full Web server, which must be acquired
separately, Dorsey said.
While licences for the Platform Edition are available at no cost,
support for the software is priced at $795 annually per CPU.
Besides helping to broaden the customer base for Sun's Java
technology, which is locked in battle with Microsoft's .net
software, Sun hopes to make money by selling more hardware and
services, and by persuading customers to upgrade to fee-based
versions of its products over time.
Customers who want to upgrade from the free product to the Standard
Edition will do so by activating a software "key" that turns on
additional functions in the product, Dorsey said. Upgrading to the
Enterprise Edition will require installing new software from a CD
or from the Web, he said.
Sun is also developing add-on "modules" for its application server
that will provide, for example, more sophisticated Web services
management capabilities, or additional security features for
"trusted transaction" environments, Dorsey said. Those modules are
expected to begin appearing in 2003.
Sun has also fleshed out its tools strategy, announcing plans to
release its Sun ONE Developer Platform in the fourth quarter,
priced at $5,000 per seat. It includes tools from Sun ONE Studio
4.0 and developer licences for a variety of Sun server software,
and aims to provide a more integrated environment that lets teams
of application developers collaborate on projects.
"I think they have a pretty good story there," said Current
Analysis' Willett. "They take different elements of the platform
and give you common tools and administrative capabilities that
allow you to leverage their directory, portal and other products
more easily."
Sun is not the first vendor to give away a version of its
application server; HP late last year announced a similar plan. HP,
however, failed to attract a large customer base for its product,
according to analysts, and the company revealed earlier this month
that it will "retire" its middleware products and look to
partnerships with vendors such as BEA instead.
Sun's move to offer a free application server does not spell doom
and gloom for BEA, Willett of Current Analysis said. BEA has a
large customer base and its WebLogic product has a sound reputation
for being reliable and scalable, he said.
Sun's application server today can be clustered across only six or
eight nodes, he said, while BEA's product can scale to hundreds of
nodes. Sun officials asserted that the Clustra technology will
allow it to match and even beat BEA's clustering capabilities.