Frontier Corp’s Frontier Communications unit has, as expected, chosen iPlanet, nee the Sun-Netscape Alliance to supply the IP applications that will form the basis of its move into the outsourced business service provider market. Frontier will start rolling out the service to ISPs and the so-called web 1000 in the fourth quarter, with general availability to other corporate due in the first two quarters of next year.
This announcement covers what Frontier calls IP utility applications by which it means email, calendaring, scheduling and a web front end and it says it is still evaluating the other applications, although it says that Sun-Netscape is one of the front runners with its application servers.
Incidentally, Sun appears to be taking the lead on this deal at least, as the messaging server here is the Sun Internet Mail server, not the Netscape messaging server. Frontier will transition to the 5.0 version of the iPlanet combined messaging server when it is released early in 2000. iPlanet beat out Software.com’s product in a three-month test in Frontier’s labs. The iPlanet software will feed into Frontier’s uCommand web portal that will gather together the messaging and other application components.
