Sun Plans Web Services Product Blitz

Sun also plans to release new versions of its identity server and new tools next year, said Mark Bauhaus, vice president of Java Web Services for Sun in a roundtable briefing here Wednesday.

Bauhaus said Sun recently put together a detailed multiyear Web services product road map in the wake of a restructuring that put all of Sun's far-flung software development efforts under one group.

Sun is also planning as promised a Web services standard push centered around the J2EE 1.4 specification, which is slated to be released in the middle of next year. That represents a "very important fusion of Java and Web services together," said Bauhaus.

The reinvigorated product push is aimed at giving solution providers an open multivendor environment for building Web services.

Bauhaus admitted that Sun has been "way too quiet" in terms of promoting Web services innovation and standards. He said the company is going on the "offensive" and will play a much more aggressive role in pushing Web standards.

Sun's Web services push is aimed at providing a comprehensive and complete platform that has a high return on investment for every segment of the market, including small businesses, so people "don't have to pay $80,000 per CPU for one tiny little feature of the whole Java Web services platform," said Bauhaus.

Pierre Fricke, executive vice president at D.H. Brown Associates, a Port Chester, N.Y.-based industry consulting company, praised Sun for driving "entry-level price points" for the Java Web services platform. That entry-level push is critical in going up against Microsoft's. Net combined with Dell Computer's server offerings, he said.

Fricke said Sun's LX50 Server matched up strongly on a price-performance basis against Dell's competitive offering in an analysis done by D.H. Brown in August.

Without referring specifically to Microsoft's .Net Web services platform, Bauhaus said that customers are concerned that the Web services could be "hijacked" by a proprietary implementation.

Sun's aim is to make sure that there is an "open, royalty-free" Web services standard that is "uncontrolled from a monopolization perspective," said Bauhaus. "Everybody is worried about this."

The same open standards battle centered around HTML, but standards converged so it became a nonissue, said Bauhaus. "This too shall pass," he said, referring to the fight for open Web services standards. "There is a fork in the road here, and we have got to make sure we pick the right one as an industry."

"If anybody tries to take a significant part of the XML Web services phenomenon and close it up in the sense of owning it and not making it available or charging for it, we have all got a problem because at that point it could be very easily hijacked and become uneconomical, and nobody needs a monopoly in the Web services space," he said.

Bauhaus said that with Sun's software offerings under one group solution providers will see a more concerted effort to court them to write Web services using the SunOne Java platform. He reaffirmed that Sun is committed to partnering with solution providers rather than building a huge consulting force or acting as an IT outsourcer in the mold of IBM Global Services.