That’s according to vice president of software sales Barbara Gordon, who told ComputerWire that Sun is evaluating a number of potential pricing options for the integrated Sun ONE stack, due this summer.

Those options under consideration include charging per employee and per concurrent user.

There are a bunch of ways we can do this, she said. We are looking for a highly competitive offering that gives people an incentive to sign-up for technology they weren’t looking for, Gordon said.

A successful price model is vital for Sun. The company plans to unify the release cycles of its ONE Application Server, Portal, Network and Identity servers with Solaris by the end of its fiscal year in July.

Integration is designed to end perceived confusion among users created by different product release dates and version numbers of Sun’s software products.

Helping drive Sun’s thinking on price, though, is the desire to capitalize on the unpopularity of last year’s licensing changes made by rival Microsoft Corp to its own software. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft’s licensing 6.0 prompted a wide-scale revolt as many customers chose to renew existing volume licensing agreements rather than sign up to the new model, regarded as more expensive.

Sun hopes it can leverage price and encourage customers to adopt multiple products in instances where they would have just bought one. The company belives this can drive uptake of products across its entire software portfolio.

One notable weakness in that portfolio is the Sun ONE Application Server, currently languishing on single-digit share of application server revenue behind leaders IBM and San Jose, California-based BEA Systems Inc according to Giga Information Group.

Also important, though, is version 6.0 of Sun’s Identity Server. The server is Sun’s first to support the Liberty Alliance Project’s XML-based specifications for federated network identity, and designed to grow Sun’s presence in this green-field market.

When you are not number one, you have to re-set the playing field, Gordon said. Giving people the opportunity to use new technology is going to be a big differentiator in market share.

Source: Computerwire