Sun Touts Software Upgrades

The Santa Clara, Calif., hardware and software vendor said it will offer a combined package of its Solaris 10 operating system, development tools and the Java Enterprise System (Java ES) – comprising Sun&'s Java Availability Suite, Java Web Infrastructure Suite, Java Identity Management Suite, Java Application Platform Suite and Java Communication Suite – for $140 per user per month. The pricing includes maintenance and technical support. Customers also can buy the individual components for $50 per user, per month.

Sun also said release 4 of Java ES, now available has been updated to support Windows 2000, Linux and HP-UX. Sun said it will support Windows 2003 within the next 90 days.

Sun also revealed that it has made its Java Desktop software available to all Linux distributions.

Sun additionally said it now has more than 3 million registered users of Solaris 10. “This has been the fastest and broadest adoption of software in the history of our company,” said Tom Goguen, Sun&'s vice president of operations.

According to John Loicano, executive vice president of software, that momentum is translating to greater third-party support of Sun&'s newest operating system. “In a few weeks you should expect to see an announcement from IBM about its blade center technology,” he told a group of journalists Tuesday. “We are excited by the fact of a major manufacturer&'s supporting Solaris 10 right out of the factory.”

In other third party news, Computer Associates International said it will offer Unicenter and Brightstor solutions for Solaris 10 on x64 platforms.