Interview

“We expect to see 600,000 Indian Java developers by 2006”

Mike Bellissimo, senior director, Software Developer Marketing & Management at Sun Microsystems talks to Prashant L Rao about Sun’s efforts to localise its developer-oriented offerings in partnership with Indian ISVs; the Java Enterprise and Java Desktop offerings and what’s new on the mobile and IDE fronts

* Is Sun making efforts to provide a localised experience for Java developers in India?

There are 300,000 Java developers in India and we expect that number to double by 2006. Sun is building a developer-specific portal for Indian developers that will live under sun.com/developers. Sun Developer Network (SDN) is where we provide products and technology, technical information, training, education and support to developers. We want to localise it by establishing partnerships with Indian vendors to make sure that content on SDN is relevant to India. Sun is working on a reference architecture with Infosys. It works with Indian companies such as Nucleus and the Indian development centres of i2, SAP and Oracle. Our efforts at customisation will be in areas such as developing specific applications using Java Studio Enterprise for vertical industry segments that are important to the Indian market in segments such as retail. When it comes to pricing our content programmes we follow a different model for India. For instance, SDN is free in India.

* What’s the rationale behind Java Enterprise (formerly Project Orion)?

200 software products have been consolidated down to six solutions—Java Enterprise, Java Desktop, Java Mobile, Java Identity, Java Studio Enterprise and N1. These solutions are combinations of products and services and are easier to deploy. Sun ONE and iPlanet products and solutions have been combined with grid and cluster technology into one easy-to-implement solution. In the past, many of these product upgrades were rolled out in a haphazard fashion. Today, we have a quarterly release schedule for the product suites. This ensures interoperability. We’ve done away with the traditional support, maintenance, training and consulting model to a Solaris-plus pricing model on a per employee basis. Java Enterprise costs Rs. 4,800 per user [approximately for an organisation with 1,000 users].

* Have users in the Asia-Pacific accepted Java Desktop and StarOffice 7?

The Asia-Pacific is one of the fastest growing regions for StarOffice 7. For the desktop PC user to have a full experience on the desktop we are offering the Sun Ray thin-client plus the Java Desktop at $100 per desktop. [Rs. 2,400 per user approximately for a 1,000-user organisation in India]. We have over 140,000 StarOffice 6 users in the region, of whom over 20,000 are in India. Sun has just announced a deal with China to roll out half a million to a million Java Desktop System PCs in the next one year.

* Newer mobile phones seem a little sluggish compared to old ones. As a lot of newer handsets run Java (J2ME), is there an ongoing effort toward optimising the platform?

There are 100 million handsets running Java. Sun doesn’t completely control [the performance aspect on these handsets]. J2ME has a sub-64 KB kernel and we continue to improve its performance by working with carriers and handset manufacturers such as Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Vodaphone who have adopted our specs for writing applications. We have a Mobility Developer Programme for getting applications tested and certified. On the PDA front we’re working with Palm, Sony and Blackberry.

* You had launched the Sun ONE Studio some time back. What’s new on the IDE front?

Java Studio Enterprise (JSE) will be out in February 2004. It will have a set of integrated tools, including an IDE, optimised EJB (Enterprise Java Beans), a lot of one-button click functionality and the Java Enterprise System runtime (Application Server, Web Server, Identity Server, etc). We will provide optimal interfaces and simple installation. JSE will be 20 percent faster than the old studio product. It will be priced at an additional $5 per employee, over and above the Java Enterprise pricing for an organisation. There will also be a standalone version priced at $1,895. JSE will offer Java developers rapid development capabilities with one-click buttons and rapid prototyping for the first time.