By Rachel Chalmers
The Sun-Netscape Alliance has sought to clarify its application server strategy, perhaps reacting to the widespread confusion exacerbated by the abrupt departure of NetDynamics Inc co-founder Zack Rinat last week. Sun Microsystems Inc bought NetDynamics last year, then inherited a second application server business as part of the merger between Netscape Communications Corp and America Online Inc.
AOL didn’t want the bother of dealing with Netscape’s enterprise software, which Netscape itself had acquired when it bought a NetDynamics competitor called Kiva. So through an unlikely series of accidents, Sun ended up with the remnants of two of the hot young application server vendors of 1997. One can only imagine how the employees of these ancestral rivals viewed the prospect of a forced merger. Hence, perhaps, the sudden resignation of Rinat.
Unfortunately the Sun-Netscape Alliance’s clarification fails to make the situation much clearer. The Alliance proposes a two stage process for merging its twin application servers into a single platform. As stage 1, the Alliance will release NetDynamics 5.01 and Netscape Application Server (NAS) 4.0 in the next few months. The two will support a single programming model in the shape of the Java 2.0 software development kit (SDK). By early 2000, both products should share components for management and enterprise integration.
Stage 2 should see the release of a platform which combines the rapid deployment environment, business framework and enterprise integration of NetDynamics with the transaction processing and high availability of NAS. This gargantuan hybrid is supposed to be backwardly compatible with applications written for both NetDynamics and NAS, and it should still support the Java 2.0 SDK, meaning users can develop now for deployment on it. It’s aimed at large sites, portals and enterprises building legacy applications.
In short, it’s supposed to be the best of all possible worlds. The only remaining questions are: whether the Sun-Netscape Alliance can staunch staff losses from both the former NetDynamics and the former Kiva; whether it can win back markets already lost to fast-moving competitors like BEA, Allaire and Bluestone; and indeed, whether it can pull off this remarkable feat of integration at all.
