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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 1, 2003; VOL. 2 NO. 35
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Systems/Enterprise:
SUN GEARS UP FOR SEPTEMBER'S
PROJECT ORION LAUNCH
by Nick Patience for the451.com
Sun Microsystems has provided us with a little more clarification on
Project
Orion, the new infrastructure software initiative the company is due to launch
next month. Orion will see Sun synchronize most of its software releases on a
quarterly schedule, joining Solaris, which has been on such a schedule for
some time.
Impact Assessment
The message Sun's Project Orion will be launched in September. Sun promises
to
simplify pricing and licensing, reduce prices and perhaps even indemnify its
customers.
Competitive landscape IBM is the biggest current threat, but Sun sees
Microsoft as the bigger long-term threat. The high end is where BEA has done
the most to expose Sun's weakness in software, and Oracle has been very
aggressive at the application server layer. Other competition comes from JBoss
Group, Novell, Sybase, SeeBeyond and SAP.
The 451 Assessment
Sun now seems to be getting its messages straight and has backed off some
of
the bolder claims about the indemnification, which were in danger of clouding
its own product launch. This remains a risky strategy, although Sun clearly
thinks it has more to gain than lose -- and we believe it's right about that
-- but it speaks volumes about the success of its middleware business thus
far.
Price
Pricing has not been announced for Orion, but it will be based on the
number
of employees in the company. Companies will be charged an annual fee, per
employee, which will include all software licenses, implementation, training
and education for one year. This is renewable at the end of the term, when
changes can be made if the number of employees has altered. Given that the
price is expected to be between $100 and $200 per employee, where Sun places
the figure will have a dramatic effect on how cost-effective Orion is,
especially for the largest companies. Sun will cap the per-employee number at
120,000, but obviously that doesn't apply to very many companies anyway. The
challenge will be to strike the right price so that other vendors don't end up
comparing Orion's price unfavorably with their own, more conventional pricing
models. Although they'll probably do that anyway.
Customers will pay for the entire Orion bundle, even if they only intend to
use part of it. Sun insists that it's checked with corporate buyers that have
indicated they don't mind this -- that they'll break even if they currently
use three Sun products. Everything beyond that will basically be free, based
on the current pricing. But we're not sure CEOs at smaller companies will be
so enamored of the prospect of paying for instant shelfware. Sun says customer
checks have shown that it could close deals within 10 days based on this
pricing. Sun also says that it will sell based on the number of employees in
the whole company, even if Orion is only to be used by a small number, say in
one department. Once more, Sun says it's checked and that's fine with its
customer base -- but again, that feels counterintuitive to us given these
stringent economic ties.
That said, we feel this could be a significant midmarket opportunity for
Sun,
exposing it to companies that currently haven't been able to afford a Java-
based middleware stack. Companies with employees in the hundreds, or the low
thousands, could see significant price reductions. Of course they'd have to
buy Sun hardware to get it; but still, we think this is where the sweet spot
will probably lie initially.
Products
Sun has now settled on which bits of its stack are in Orion and which are
not.
In the first release, which will come toward the end of the year (we're
hearing at the end of November), the following components will be updated in
line with Solaris: directory server, identity server, directory proxy server,
the platform edition and standard edition of the application server, message
queue enterprise edition, Web server, messaging server, calendar server,
instant messaging server, portal server, portal remote server and cluster
server. The second release, three months later, will add integration server
and portal mobile access server. Three months on -- around mid-2004 -- Sun
will add application server enterprise edition, active server pages, Mad
Hatter management server (for managing the forthcoming Mad Hatter Linux-based
desktop environment) and SunRay server. Sun will add eventually more elements
as it acquires or builds them, such as the Pixo mobile content downloading
technology it bought in June.
Despite the considerable effort it's made to gather all the software and
pricing into a simple package -- Sun is promising a two-page license agreement
for the whole lot -- Sun also wants to make clear that the package can be
broken up and integrated into other vendors' software, and vice versa. So if a
customer is wedded to their BEA WebLogic implementation, they can continue to
use that and all the other elements of Orion apart from Sun's own J2EE
application server.
Partners
Sun is talking to its software partners -- of which BEA is one -- to see if
they want to adopt the Orion pricing scheme. It will be interesting to see if
any of them have done this by the time of the launch at September's SunNetwork
conference in San Francisco.
Sun says it will consider offering Orion on non-Sun, Intel-based hardware
further down the line, but initially you'll only get Orion pricing if you run
on Sun's Sparc- or Intel-based servers running Solaris.
Branding
Sun software has been through a variety of brand names over the past few
years, the latest of which is Sun ONE. That will change to some extent again
next month, although we're not sure whether the ONE branding will disappear
entirely. The software currently known as Project Orion Deployer is separate
from Project Orion Developer, which is all of Sun's development tools -- in an
ideal world these would come out before the servers that the developed
applications will be deployed on. They'll come after, but still before the end
of the year. There will also be a Project Orion Desktop, aka Mad Hatter.
Orion is separate from Sun's N1 initiative, that branding will remain,
post-
Orion. At present there are no plans to include N1 software, apart from the
cluster server in the Orion release cycle. N1, which includes application,
system and network management elements, is the stuff used to manage the
systems in which the Orion software runs.
Competition
IBM is currently its biggest threat, but Sun believes IBM's Linux- centric
approach (leaving aside Windows and IBM's proprietary platforms) is a chink in
its armor because of its involvement in the SCO lawsuit. Sun had been making a
lot of noise recently about being able to indemnify its customers against
litigation because it owns its intellectual property -- everything from the
processor to the software. The only possible issue could be SCO's claims that
purveyors of Unix need to pay the company to avoid being sued because Unix
code has allegedly leaked into Linux. Sun quietly signed a licensing deal with
SCO back in March to avoid that problem. We thought using IBM's legal issues
as a reason to buy Sun software instead was a bit misguided, and for now at
least it the company seems to have quieted down on the issue.
Microsoft is probably the biggest long-term threat and reinforces our
expectation that Orion could be a stronger play in the midmarket than at the
high end. The latter is where BEA has done the most to expose Sun's weakness
in software -- although BEA clearly has its own growth problems and would make
an interesting acquisition for Sun, if it could pull it off. Oracle competes
at the application server layer mainly, but will increasingly do so at the
collaboration layer as well.
Other competition comes from JBoss Group, Novell and Sybase, but also from
integration companies with broader ambitions -- notably SeeBeyond, which has
recently gotten its own application server. SAP leads the application
providers on this front.
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