Sun To Bundle BEA App Server With Solaris 9

Sun plans to offer an enterprise version of BEA WebLogic Server with a six-month evaluation license in the administrator's kit of an update due out in January, said Graham Lovell, director of Solaris marketing at Sun.

Eric Stahl, director of product marketing for WebLogic Server at BEA, said the move is a natural extension of the two companies' longtime partnership. "It's basically providing a broad reach for us to get a large volume of product out to the Sun community," Stahl said.

The Sun-BEA partnership became strained this year as Sun aggressively promoted its own Java software strategy. Throughout the year, McNealy repeatedly disparaged BEA, saying that Sun would be stealing considerable market share from BEA by offering a Java app server in its Solaris operating system.

Solaris 9, released in May, includes a free, limited-use version of the Sun ONE app server.

Lovell said that while Sun's priority is still to sell its own products, the company recognizes that BEA is a leading app server running on Solaris.

Yet McNealy's comments and Sun's apparent about-face have puzzled some solution providers.

Rob Mock, founder and president of Detroit-based solution provider Dewpoint, said McNealy has made a "big mistake in making alienating comments about BEA," since a "huge percentage" of Solaris deployments run BEA app servers.

At the same time, Mock said Sun is sending a confusing message to Solaris users by bundling a competitor's app server with an OS that already has the Sun ONE app server built in.

Curt Stevenson, founder and vice president of business development at solution provider Back Bay Technologies, Boston, said that just because an OS has a free app server doesn't mean customers won't buy best-of-breed alternatives. "An application server decision at the enterprise level is still a significant one, and corporate customers are probably not going to be swayed by what is shipped," Stevenson said.

According to the latest Giga Information Group numbers, BEA is tied with IBM for the No. 1 spot in app server market share, with Sun coming in well behind them in third place.

"Sun probably realizes it needs to do this so it doesn't alienate Solaris users who have already standardized on BEA and don't necessarily want to make huge adjustments with new application server platforms," said Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis.