Frantic to position its Solaris operating system as the internet platform of choice, Sun Microsystems Inc has released an array of net-related announcements under a vision statement umbrella. Announced at the Inside Sun Software Day today, the Solaris Net Business Services statement describes an array of services to be offered by Sun or its ISV partners to those large organizations which are building network systems based on the internet protocols. Chief among these services – and Remy Malan, director of marketing for Solaris, exhorts us to think of internet services rather than consulting services – is a new release of Solaris for ISPs. New releases of Sun’s Internet Mail Server and Internet Calendar Server have also been announced, along with competency centres to encourage development for Solaris on Intel, an Advanced Internet Consulting Business and strategic alliances with Fujitsu, Hitachi, NCR and Siemens Nixdorf. This ream of announcements suggests that Sun is obeying one of the unspoken rules of IT public relations: if you haven’t had any press in a while, bombard the pundits with paper. Clearly, Solaris for ISPs is the big story, and this is puzzling because Solaris is the choice of ISPs. The OS underpins such mighty net endeavors as HotMail, to the huge embarrassment of HotMail owner Microsoft Corp. Malan explains that Solaris for ISPs is a module, comparable with Solaris for Intranets or Solaris for Enterprises. He says it is the fruit of eighteen months’ worth of market research. ISPs told us they wanted to make sure their server environments were security hardened, he says. Most of their servers are outside the firewall. They told us the grace period was typically five minutes, before someone would try to hack into a new server. They wanted us to make sure Solaris was street smart for that very hostile environment. Accordingly, Sun has revamped the installation process. ISPs specify which services a server will support, and the OS automatically strips away the rest, eliminating back doors for hackers. Additionally, these servers can clone themselves across a network. Once an administrator has worked out their preferred configuration, he or she can set up new servers in a fraction of the time. Another ISP-specific feature included in this version of Solaris is performance monitoring. Malan describes this as a virtual subscriber, which can test the performance of services, helping ISPs to guarantee service levels and better preparing them to take on business outsourcing roles. Web, ftp and news servers have also been produced with special ISP features like support for virtual domains. The new mail and calendar servers boast industrial-strength performance too, according to Malan. The ISPs said don’t bother turning up with less than a million mailboxes, he says. He estimates that the performance of Sun Internet Mail Server (SIMS) 3.5 is two orders of magnitude better than Microsoft’s rival Exchange. Digital certificate support has been added and anti- spam measures beefed up. For its part, the calendar server, which automates group planning, is based on the iCalendar protocol emerging from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Strategic alliances with Intel and Siemans Nixdorf will establish development centres in the US and Europe. Hitachi and TCI have committed to Solaris as a server platform for their JavaOS set top boxes. Lucent has said it will team with Sun on carrier class solutions for the largest of the large, Malan says. All this marketing comes a little after the fact. The most conservative research figures Malan could find suggested that Solaris runs 65% of ISP servers. But the market is changing and as service providers opt for off-the-shelf, scalable packages over hand-made software, Sun wants to catch the wave. The company wants ISPs to capitalize on the internet and the market for business services. The message is raw capitalism. For ISPs, the $19.95 flat rate internet access market is like living on a fixed income, Malan says. You can live within your means but it’s not very exciting. We’d love to see our customers using our products to offer premium services – and earn more money. á
