In spite of inventing successful technology—Java being the best example—Sun hasn’t profited from its software endeavours in the past. With Sun ONE, the company hopes to change that. Prashant L Rao analyses Sun’s chances of pulling off a transformation into a software-driven powerhouse

Sun Microsystems has traditionally been a hardware shop. Even its biggest software success, Java, did more for others than it did for Sun itself. But that’s history now as Sun gears up to do battle with Microsoft and leverage its software brands, which are now consolidated under three roofs—Sun ONE (Open Net Environment), Java and Solaris. Sun has seen several major wins in India for Sun ONE, including marquee accounts such as BSNL and RBI. The Sun ONE software stack runs the gamut of enterprise applications from messaging to application servers.

Driven by software
Sun is moving from being a hardware vendor to a software and services driven player. “We have a separate team for sales and pre-sales customer contact for Sun ONE,” says K P Unnikrishnan, country head marketing at Sun Microsystems India. “Implementation, execution and second tier sales are taken care of by our channel partners.”

Software accounts for 7-8 percent of Sun’s revenues in India. The company projects this as doubling to 15 percent by July 2003. Significantly, every alternate deal made by Sun has a Sun ONE component. About 35 percent of Sun ONE sales take place as standalone deals. It is clear from this that Sun is using the Sun ONE software stack to give it an edge in its hardware sales.

Winning over the developer
Vijay Anand, managing director, India Engineering Centre, Sun Microsystems India says, “Our first goal is to win the developer with a set of tools, platform and integration software. We want to drive Java technology.”

6,000 CDs of the Sun ONE starter kit have been distributed by Sun India. 70 ISVs are porting their applications to Sun ONE Application Server 7. The total number of Java developers and architects in India is a staggering 220,000.

The lynchpin of this effort is the Sun ONE developer platform, an integrated platform with an application server, directory server, identity server and portal server. Microsoft has its Visual Studio.NET. Sun’s equivalent is the Sun ONE Studio that will be based on its Net Beans project. The goal is to provide developers with a toolkit that lets them specify the desired functionality and have Java beans automatically generated by the Studio. If you would rather deploy a Web service, a click of a button will convert the bean into one. Prefer a portlet for your J2EE compliant portal server? It’s another button click away.

Sun says that it has overcome the performance issues that dogged Java in its early days. Anand says, “Starting with J2EE 1.3 and the Hotspot Virtual Machine, Java runs at close to native speed. The performance gap between Java and C++ has closed.”

Implementation, execution and second tier sales are taken care off by channel partners, says K P Unnikrishnan

Java Web Services
Earlier, developers creating Web applications had two choices—they could go with ASP (Active Server Pages) technology from Microsoft or JSP (Java Server Pages) from Sun. Today Sun is focusing on Web services. In J2EE 1.3, Sun offered n-tier computing with JSP on the Web layer and EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) for the business logic in the application server and Java connectors or JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) at the database layer. In its successor, J2EE 1.4, Sun will offer both Web services, through the Web Services Developer Pack for Application Server, and JSPs. J2EE 1.4 with support for Web services is due in June 2003 as Java One.

Competing with .NET
“We are competing with .NET,” admits Anand. “We want to have Java on any device.” Sun is working hard to convince developers that it has a more viable platform than Microsoft. The company believes that its strengths lie in the fact that its technology is cross-platform—Java spans Windows and UNIX. The other advantage is Java’s open nature—the Java Community Process lets any member add a feature to Java, including Indian firms. Sun recognises that .NET has certain advantages, the key one being that Microsoft’s platform and tools are easy to use. Sun believes that .NET’s disadvantage is that it is not an open platform and it doesn’t scale.

A key difference is that where Microsoft supports a plethora of programming languages in .NET, Java is the only language in J2EE. On the face of it, this seems to be an advantage for .NET. If you look deeper, however, programmers don’t choose languages based on syntactic differences, which is all that .NET’s support for a multitude of languages offers. Developers pick programming languages based on the needs of their application. For instance, when you need speedy and compact code, you pick C. If you need to create a quick and easy GUI front-end you would probably pick Visual Basic or Delphi. That choice isn’t really available on .NET as no matter what language you pick you still write to the Common Language Runtime with identical performance levels and look-and-feel.

Working with .NET
Sun ONE provides for interoperability with .NET. It supports the discovery of both .NET and Sun ONE Web services. The platform supports Web services as well as JSP and ASP. It’s directory server works with Microsoft’s ADS technology.

A leaf out of Microsoft’s book
On the server operating system front, Sun is imitating Microsoft. The latter has bundled its application server as part of Windows NT and 2000 all along. Sun followed suit with its Solaris 9 release where it bundled the Sun ONE application server with the OS for the first time as part of its goal of offering an integrated and simple platform. The integration of products like the application server and directory server into Solaris is part of this strategy to make things seamless.

Desktop Java
Sun wants to have Java on every desktop by getting J2SE 1.4.1 bundled with Windows XP. US courts are still deciding on that one. Sun is looking for a piece of the desktop. The Mad Hatter initiative that is expected to debut in H1 2003 will be a Gnome-fronted Linux desktop that Anand says will be “very nice looking and easy to use.” In the past, Java clients have lacked visual polish vis-à-vis Microsoft’s GUIs.

Can Sun make it work?
While Sun has been successful in software in the past, this success has been at the platform level and not at the product level. J2EE is a huge success, and the technology powers market leading application servers from IBM and BEA but Sun’s own application server hasn’t enjoyed the same level of success. That’s why the company is now synchronising releases of enterprise software with the Solaris operating system and integrating components into the OS. That said, having a strong integrated software bundle will be a plus for Sun, particularly at the lower end of the server market where it competes with Intel boxes that usually ship without an OS, leave alone applications. Sun ONE has been well received by Sun’s traditional strongholds—the service provider and banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) segments. Software is likely to play an increasingly important role in hardware sales and Sun is riding that wave with Sun ONE.

Indian Connection
The latest versions of directory server and application server were made in India. Sun outsources work to its Indian partners, including Infosys, Wipro and TCS. Its partners are porting Sun ONE Application Server 7 to HP UX and IBM AIX. Application Server 7 is available in a single node configuration today. Sun is working to release the Enterprise Edition that will let you cluster nodes. To tie in with the upcoming release of J2EE 1.4, Sun is working on the next version of Application Server confirming to the 1.4 spec that should be out by end-2003. The Sun ONE Identity Server and Application Server Enterprise Edition are being developed in India. “Half of the product development work is done here,” says Anand. Of the 400-plus developers at Sun’s Indian Engineering Centre, 350 work on Sun ONE.

Streamlining software brands
Formerly, Sun’s software products were marketed under several brands, including iPlanet and Forte. It’s enterprise application software and developer tools have been rebranded under the Sun ONE umbrella. Anil Valluri, director systems engineering, Sun Microsystems India says, “Sun ONE is a rebranding of Sun’s software stack. We had too many brands earlier.” With Sun ONE, Sun has three software brands, Solaris and Java being the other two. The Sun ONE umbrella covers everything from messaging to portals, identity to application servers, developer tools and the StarOffice suite. Sun ONE is powered by Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), which is used to execute business logic.

TCS and Sun ONE
India’s biggest software firm, TCS, has done numerous implementations on the iPlanet and Sun ONE platforms. Most of these have revolved around the iPlanet/Sun ONE application server. The app server is the only constant with other components, including portal server, communications suite, directory server and application builder being used on a case-by-case basis. “The Web server gets picked based on the choice of Application Server,” explains N G Subramaniam, vice president, TCS Bangalore Operations and head-Banking Industry Practice. “The choice of which application server to use is generally made by the customer.”

TCS’s Sun ONE implementations include Ritu Nanda Insurance Services Pvt Ltd (RNIS), Eaton Corporation USA, Aiesec International Netherlands, GE Financial Assurance, AIG, JM Morgan Stanley in Mumbai, UP Power Corporation in Lucknow and Data Access in Delhi.