Sun Microsystems Inc and NetObjects Inc will work together to bring NetObjects Authoring Server Suite to Solaris. NetObjects CEO Samir Arora says his customers approached him asking for the Solaris port. We had enterprise customers who only used Solaris and people were moving to NT for us, Arora told ComputerWire. We will look at AIX and Linux as well as NetWare in the future. But Sun’s presence in web-enablement in the enterprise is very high with Solaris; there’s also a lot of Lotus Domino on Solaris, which tells you that Sun is really rising in that space. Pun intended, no doubt.
The deal with Sun follows similar partnerships between NetObjects and IBM and Novell, but this is the first time NetObjects has been ported to an operating system other than Windows NT. The project is proceeding in three stages: evaluation, test piloting and feasibility, which is completed; porting of the Authoring Server Suite to the platform, which is under way; and deep integration of Authoring Server with whatever Sun eventually settles on as its web application server platform, out of its NetDynamics and Kiva properties. That integration to an unknown destination is made possible through Sun’s commitment to Enterprise Java Beans and Java Server Pages.
