Sun Joins WS-I

Ed Julson, group marketing manager for Web services standards and technologies at Sun, said Sun's joining the board was spurred by WS-I's decision last week to add two members to its board of nine directors.

"Sun's issue really has never been related to whether WS-I is doing the right thing," Julson said. "Our problem has fundamentally been that we've not been able to join at the level we thought was appropriate. Now that the WS-I has ratified the motion to add two seats to the board, they've opened the door."

Julson said Sun plans to run for a board seat. The nomination process for the seats opens Jan. 1 and ends Feb. 15, with elections taking place in March. The new board members will take their seats in April.

Julson said that the increase of Web services standards in the industry of late is confusing the issue. Sun is looking forward to helping stymie that confusion, he said.

"There is a great deal of concern around complexity and overlapping functionality around these standards, and developers are unsure what to do," Julson said. "We think it's really important for Sun, Microsoft, IBM and others to sit down and start the work to simplify this standards effort."

There has been animosity between Sun and WS-I founders IBM and Microsoft since evidence surfaced that Sun was purposefully not asked to be a founding member when the group formed in February.

That bad blood worsened in May when an e-mail introduced in the Microsoft antitrust trial showed that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates indicated that he would approve Microsoft's participation in WS-I only if Sun wasn't involved in its launch. At the time, a Sun insider also said there was other evidence showing that Microsoft and IBM voted against Sun's participation as a WS-I co-founder and wanted "to stick it to Sun" in the Web services game.

Julson said Sun is joining the group "in good faith" despite the tension between Sun and Microsoft.

"I think that many customers out there have had enough of the bickering," Julson said. "We have to learn to get along with Microsoft, and they have to learn to get along with us. We just have to make it happen. We're not always going to agree--that's not the objective. But we can certainly be civil."

WS-I currently numbers more than 150 companies, including industry heavyweights BEA Systems, Oracle, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel.