Sun Unveils iPlanet Product Road Map

Sun Microsystems

Sun executives also said the iPlanet, Solaris and Forte software lines now will be branded under Sun ONE, unveiling an aggressive marketing and ad campaign to promote the entire platform as the software architecture for providing services on demand.

In his address at the morning general session, Stuart Wells, senior vice president of iPlanet products, said four new iPlanet products supporting Sun's Sun ONE vision will be available in the late summer to early fall time frame.

One is iPlanet Application Server 7.0, which will support J2EE 1.3, the latest version of the spec. Sun will also integrate the clustering technology it acquired recently from Clustra Systems into the new release, said Wells. Sun also will make available a new version of the iPlanet portal, iPlanet Portal Server 6.0, at the same time, he added.

In addition, Sun will unveil iPlanet Directory Server 5.2, which will include a UDDI Web services directory, said Wells. The directory server, iPlanet's flagship product, is key to Sun's notion of creating a network identity, one of the main points in its Sun ONE strategy. Project Liberty, which Sun and a host of vendors launched late last year to create a specification for a federated network identity to facilitate single sign-on for Web services, also is key to this plan, said Wells.

Finally, Sun will introduce an integrated Web Services Development Platform, which will include the iPlanet app server, portal and directory products, said Wells. The product should be available in August, he said.

In his address, Wells outlined the three areas Sun is focusing its Sun ONE effort this year: identity management, portal and application and Web servers. He said Sun is currently in phase two of its Web services platform development, which is to create an architecture to support Web services that can be published in and accessed from private UDDI directories. He added that this phase should be completed by fall of this year.

Phase one of Sun's Web services plan was to create an architecture using its Sun Forte tools, iPlanet products and Java APIs for XML so clients can use SOAP messaging to call Web services from back-end systems through the firewall, said Wells. This phase is complete, he added.

Phase three, the final phase, will create a Web services architecture to support a public UDDI directory so any company will be able to use SOAP messaging and Liberty-based single sign-on to securely publish and access Web services, he said. This will take some time to deliver but should be available by the end of 2003, Wells said.

Also during Monday's general session, Marge Breya, vice president of Sun ONE, outlined how Sun is promoting the Sun ONE brand and building communities so partners can take advantage of the platform.

Breya said Sun recently spent "in the double-digit millions" on three-page magazine ads promoting not only Sun's hardware business, but also the software business, the largest advertising investment Sun has made in pushing its software.

"This is a sea change in how Sun is marketing software," said Breya. "It's a call to action for Sun's business."

In addition to the ads, Breya said Sun also has been doing "e-marketing" by building a database of companies, media and analysts interested in Sun ONE.