McNealy's SunONE Strategy: Supplant BEA, Veritas

"The definition of middleware is software that should have been bundled for free last year," said the Sun Microsystems chairman, president and CEO last week in a roundtable setting with a group of editors at Comdex.

"I have people taking my file system out and putting Veritas in," McNealy said. "What's up with that? I was with the Lucent folks and I said, 'Would you even allow a customer to take your file system out of your telephone switch and put a third-party vendor in, or stick an EMC disk drive into the memory drive train of your environment, or add in somebody else's application server on top?' "

McNealy said Sun is basically taking the same tack as Microsoft in building more software tightly integrated into the operating system. "The differences are we're moving it to the systems platform so you don't have to go out and integrate it [with Dell or integrate it [with IBM, or whatever, and get those screwy incompatibilities," he said.

Brenda Zawatski, vice president of product and solutions marketing at Veritas, said she found McNealy's comments interesting, given that last week also saw the release of third-party benchmark results showing that data throughput on Sun Solaris 9 is increased 1,500 percent when using Veritas' file system, while system recovery happens seven times faster with Veritas' journal file system compared with Sun's log file system.

Veritas products are intended to satisfy customers' needs, not to promote or sell any particular hardware, Zawatski said. "Sun is fighting on a lot of fronts at the same time,the hardware and software fronts," she said.

Tom Kuni, president of Sales Strategies, a Metuchen, N.J., Sun and Veritas partner, said McNealy has a tough row to hoe in attempting to get rid of Veritas. "He has preached himself as a hardware company," Kuni said.

Tod Nielsen, chief marketing officer at BEA, said that while McNealy talks tough against BEA, he's really the only one at Sun who does. In reality, the relationship between Sun and BEA remains close, he said.

"What happens in the field is the Sun sales folks need to sell boxes, so they bring us in all the time to say, 'Help us win the deal,' " Nielsen said. "There are the Sun troops in the field and then there's [McNealy,everybody else has to get paid on commission, so they have to get work done."

ELIZABETH MONTALBANO contributed to this story.