Sun Microsystems Inc will unveil a product roadmap and strategy for its alliance with America OnLine Inc in New York on March 30. Yesterday the companies revealed some details of the organizational structures they are putting in place to support the wide-ranging alliance but spoke little of product plans.
Sun’s Mark Tolliver is placed in charge of the relationship as president and general manager. Barry Ariko, AOL’s SVP of the Netscape Enterprise Group, gets the additional chevrons of EVP and deputy manager of the alliance. Steve Savignano, AOL’s SVP Netscape Enterprise Group and Stuart Wells, Sun’s VP network software group become SVPs of the alliance. Sun wouldn’t say who would replace Tolliver as president of its consumer and embedded group. It will be interesting to see which technologies win out as part of the end-to-end solutions Sun and AOL will jointly develop. Sun and Netscape have their own web application servers, NetDynamics and Kiva respectively. They also have their own web, proxy and other internet server technologies. Neither would comment. Sun says it won’t describe details of the browser it is to create with AOL for use on consumer and other low-end devices until next week’s event.
