Curtis Sasaki, Sun vice president of engineering for desktop solutions, told ComputerWire the company conservatively estimates there are 20 million customers stranded on IBM Corp’s legacy operating system. Many are also using dated desktop productivity packages such as Lotus’ SmartSuite.

These organizations will be increasingly forced to migrate to another desktop hardware and software set-up because of decreased support from IBM. When they jump, Sun hopes it can catch them with Mad Hatter.

We can say ‘We can give you the complete desktop that costs a lot less money’, Sasaki said. Sun has said Mad Hatter will undercut Windows operating system and Office desktop package by up to 90%, with a per-user pricing model.

Sasaki reiterated Sun’s confidence, saying Mad Hatter would never lose a deal to Microsoft based on price. He would not go into details, but did not rule-out a volume pricing model.

Sun believes there is huge potential for Linux on the desktop. Backing earlier comments by SuSE Linux Corp’s CEO Richard Seibt, who said his company is talking to customers interested in migrating thousands of desktops to Linux, Sasaki said Sun has met companies running 125,000 desktops and government agencies with 80,000 PCs who are also interested in moving.

He noted one reason for the surge in interest is spending constraints, changes to Microsoft’s licensing model and the increasing maturity of the desktop Linux, demonstrated by a stable Mozilla browser, support for wireless and a broader number of hardware drivers.

Two years ago the technology wasn’t ready. [Linux] happened at the CTO level not the CIO level… a lot of large enterprises are faced with having to move and they don’t want to sign-up to [Microsoft’s] Software Assurance, he said.

Sasaki also believes that the maturity of open source applications like Mozilla and StarOffice, part of Mad Hatter, also disproves IBM’s contention there are no viable open source alternatives to Office.

Karen Smith, IBM’s vice-president of Linux strategy and market development recently told ComputerWire while IBM works with the OpenOffice suite, it views portals as the best way to serve-up desktop applications.

We tried the portal approach: there wasn’t take-up, Sasaki said, adding Sun spent a lot of money integrating StarOffice into portal software.

Source: Computerwire