Sun's Software Strategy

Last week, Sun said it plans to ship the StarOffice 6.0 office productivity suite on May 21 and unveil the Unix-based Solaris 9 operating system on May 22. The StarOffice upgrade takes aim at Microsoft Office's dominance on the desktop, while Solaris 9 will help Sun stem the advance of Windows 2000 in the server arena, solution providers said.

"There are lot of customers unhappy with Microsoft's near-monopoly on the desktop and [its new licensing requirements. [StarOffice 6.0 is a real strike at the Microsoft desktop," said Cliff Ulrich, director of the storage and server practice at solution provider Dewpoint, Lansing, Mich. "We won't see mass migrations, but a lot of organizations will look at it."

Sun's enhancements to Solaris 9 and its competitively priced low-end servers could slow the advances that Wintel servers have made on Sun Fire Sparc-based hardware, Ulrich said. "They're starting to refresh their workgroup servers with aggressive pricing,the v880 server is very aggressively priced," he said. "It's very competitive against four-way and eight-way Intel servers."

With StarOffice 6.0, Sun aims to cut into Office XP sales and exploit corporate dissatisfaction over Microsoft Licensing 6.0 requirements by offering an office suite at a low price point, industry observers said. StarOffice 6.0 has improved Microsoft Office import/export filters and an enhanced user interface that supports leading open-source GUIs and Windows. StarOffice 6.0 carries a $79.95 price tag, but volume discounts could reduce the per-user price to as low as $25. Large-account resellers said Microsoft Office typically costs $200 to $300 per user, per year in large-volume accounts.

"For our [customers, it's a habitual knee-jerk to buy Microsoft Office. They're not actively looking for alternatives, and we're not pushing an alternative," said Oli Thordarson, president and CEO of Alvaka Networks, a Huntington Beach, Calif., solution provider. "The [pricing pain point has not gotten high enough yet to cause them to switch."

Sun's servers and Solaris 9 will compete with servers based on Intel's 32-bit and Itanium 64-bit platforms and Microsoft's Windows 2000 and upcoming Windows.Net platforms. Sun said Solaris 9 counters the Wintel platform by integrating support for the Sun Open Net Environment (ONE) Web services platform, including an integrated Sun ONE Directory, and by acting as a foundation for Java-based Web services.