Update: Schwartz: Project Orion To Offer 'Ridiculously Compelling' Savings

In so doing, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor hopes to make the Orion proposition one that offers a "ridiculously compelling" order of magnitude of savings over existing costs, said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of the Sun Software Group, during a briefing Monday with press and industry analysts in New York.

Sun customers that are privately held will be asked for their employee head counts to calculate their licensing costs. "We'll take their word for it," he said.

CRN previously reported that Orion would be offered on a per-employee basis, but not precisely how employee numbers for a customer would be tallied.

In another departure from the past, Sun customers will no longer be charged more simply because a server is used for Internet-facing applications vs. internal applications. "We will no longer audit whether it is an external system or an internal system," Schwartz said.

Under Project Orion, which is slated to be rolled out in September at the SunNetwork 2003 conference in San Francisco and ship commercially in October,

Sun will synchronize the release schedules for core parts of its infrastructure platform, including Sun Cluster Server, Message Queue Enterprise Edition, Instant Messaging, Calendar Server, Messaging Server, Portal Server, Portal Remote Access Server, Identity Server, Web Server, two versions of Sun ONE Application Server and Directory Server. Subsequent releases will be made on a quarterly basis.

Customers will be asked to consider Project Orion as their contracts come up for renewal, Schwartz said. At least 10 customers already have responded positively to Sun's new licensing model during the pre-beta phase, he said.

Schwartz declined to specify what the per-employee pricing would be but pointed to previously published information citing a range of $100 to $200 per employee per license term.

The Project Orion bundle and licensing proposition will be available for Solaris on both the SPARC and Intel hardware platforms, Schwartz said.

Sun also plans to detail its Mad Hatter desktop Linux release at SunNetwork, and general availability of the offering is expected in the September-to-October time frame--slightly later than originally expected, he said. The software will be priced between $50 and $100 per desktop per year, although Sun will also offer a perpetual license option. Mad Hatter tightly integrates Java, the StarOffice suite, the Mozilla browser, the GNOME interface and the Evolution e-mail and calendar application.

"Folks who will find the most value are those who don't want diversity in their desktops," Schwartz said.

Sun hopes Mad Hatter will be available on 50 million PCs within the next three years, he said, pointing to OEM relationships with companies such as Dell and Sony.