Yiasou George!
The simple answer: I don't know.
BUT....I'll dig and see what I can come up with. So far, from what I understand about I-Planet (the company), it was acquired by SUNW this past fall. I haven't heard much about it other than some press releases but that doesn't mean much :)
Some background:
<"Sun's vision of anyone, anytime, anywhere computing is coming together in a viable end-to-end software architecture," said Ed Zander, chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, Inc. "i-Planet puts another unique software technology in the Sun arsenal that provides remote access to the corporate intranet from any available computer." >
This vision of their's plays very nicely into digitalme and the NDS theory of connecting users (people) with resources (everything else). I don't know of any connection with NDS at this time but that doesn't mean it won't happen or can't happen.
This entire I-Planet stuff works in the corporate environment where NDS has an 80% penetration in Fortune 100 companies. Basically it's a framework for creating secure access to your company's network from within a Java-enabled browser.
<What if you could connect to your data, applications, and services at the office from anywhere through any Internet-connected device? And without the costly and hard-to-manage aspects of modem pools, platform-specific client software, routers, or remote-access servers? What you would have is a personalized desktop, a Webtop, accessible from any JavaTM technology-enabled browser.>
I do know that Novell has been working on the same idea for sometime (called NetTop) and we do know that SUNW and NOVL have a very friendly relationship.....
Getting back to your question - I'd keep my eye on this one. With Novell's NDS for Solaris hitting its last leg of beta testing, we could see SUNW making a move to make this product (I-Planet) totally directory-enabled. The catch point will be something called LDAP.
Remember, SUNW has access to Netscape's products now (through it's deal with AOL). Netscape's Directory server would be their first choice and that's a pure LDAP directory. With NDS running LDAP natively, NDS customers can leverage that investment into I-Planet very easily with LDAP being the common language.
I'm going to look into this some more....interesting stuff...again, the main message here is "CONNECTIVITY". Connecting people with what they need (apps, files, lists, etc) so they can be productive. NOVL and SUNW seem to have visions that cover similar sights (if not the same ones at times!).
Peter J Strifas |
