CRN Interview: Jonathan Schwartz, Sun
Sun Microsystems' executive vice president of software sounded off on competitors IBM and Microsoft in an interview with Senior Editor Elizabeth Montalbano.
CRN: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and solution providers have said IBM is the best implementer of Java, a Sun-built technology. What are you doing to win mind share for Sun in the Java-based software arena?
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'I think what IBM is doing with Microsoft is realizing they were not making the headway that they wanted to in the Java world.'
Schwartz: Let's be clear. IBM has beaten Sun in the market for app servers, but their No. 1 market is in Solaris. %85 We believe that our announcement [of Sun ONE/Solaris-based Web services is going to call into question every deal IBM has in the pipeline.
IBM did outexecute us, but they were doing it on the Solaris operating environment. And we believe we know the Solaris operating environment better than they do, and we fully plan on outexecuting them in the next two or three years.
We believe that we have an incredible value proposition for customers that don't want to just pay IBM to build a middleware collection but want to go build out their apps.
CRN: Sun and IBM worked together closely on Java in the beginning, but that relationship has waned, especially with the formation of the IBM- and Microsoft-led Web Services Interoperability [WS-I group. What is Sun's stance on IBM these days?
Schwartz: I think what IBM is doing with Microsoft is realizing they were not making the headway that they wanted to in the Java world. They're cozying up to Microsoft as a business partner as well as to Microsoft's business practices and intellectual property. If you look what WS-I is all about . . . I'll tell you, I fully endorse UDDI and SOAP. I think they were great ideas and needed to happen. But I worry a lot about the licensing and patent protection that IBM has spun around it because what I hear from my customers is that it worries them.
We believe in royalty-free standards. We believe in work like the Liberty Alliance and the delivery of open standards for a dynamic, growing industry that can't be hobbled by the weird intellectual property terms that IBM is trying to put into WS-I. Would we join it if we were offered a board membership? Yes, but we'd want our condition to be that they would agree to offer open, royalty-free standards. They haven't made that offer to us, and we haven't seen them be willing to deliver royalty-free standards. So we're going to probably go our own way. And we believe that, at the end of the day, there are only two Web standards that really matter: the Java Web standard and the Microsoft [.Net Web standard. And it's up to us to make sure that the Java Web standards are open and royalty-free.