With 321,000 employees worldwide, the addition of GM to the rolls of JES users pushes the installed base of JES seats worldwide to just under 1 million. GM had already been dabbling in parts of the JES collection, including the Java Web Infrastructure Suite for infrastructure workloads and the Java Application Platform Suite for Web application development.
Sun said GM plans add the Sun Java Identity Management Suite to provide security and single sign-on capabilities for its employees. While GM could deploy JES on Windows, Linux, or HP-UX, it has chosen Solaris 10.
Sun is also very happy that cell phone operator T-Mobile has chosen Java System Identity Manager and Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition running on Solaris 10 and its Sun Fire servers to provide the portal front-end to its customer service site in Europe. This portal, called t-zones, hosts up to 20 million subscribers, and it is used by T-Mobile’s cell phone subscribers to access their accounts as well as to acquire gaming, music, and news services through the portal.
T-Mobile will run the t-zones portal on 43 Sun Fire V20z Opteron servers, four Sun Fire V240 UltraSparc-IIIi servers, two Sun Fire E2900 UltraSparc-IV midrange servers, and two Sun StorEdge 3510 FC disk arrays. Sun has been working with LogicaCMG to create the new portal, which T-Mobile says it is implementing because the current t-zones implementation is too expensive. Not surprisingly, GM also cited the high cost of other middleware as the reason for switching to JES running on Solaris.
Sun also said General Electric has chosen the Java System Identity Manager to provision user accounts on its applications and network for its 450,000 users across eleven business units. Although GE is buying one element of the JES software, it is not buying the whole enchilada, so these seats don’t count in the JES installed base.
