An alliance with Sun is expected to be announced this week.
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McNealy Rallies His Partners
Updated 1:54 PM ET March 4, 2000
By Deborah Gage, Sm@rt Reseller
Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy next week will announce a sweeping
partner strategy that aims to cement Sun's position as an e-business giant.
At an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, McNealy is expected to unveil
"i-Communities"--a series of partnerships with leading e-verticals that will bring
together service providers, integrators, software vendors and dot-com start-ups
across multiple industries. The initiative aims to make Sun's products, especially
Solaris-based servers, the standards for launching an e-business.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is taking similar steps. The company has invested $100
million in VerticalNet, a cross-industry vertical portal provider, and an unspecified
sum in Honeywell to co-develop a vertical-manufacturing portal. Microsoft also
inked this week a deal with Radiant Systems' RetailEnterprise unit to build vertical
retail portals based on Microsoft technologies and products.
Sun's Not Standing Still
But Sun isn't standing still. WebHarbor--the ASP portal owned by Sun integrator
Avcom--is expected to be one of Sun's first i-Community partners. Other
candidates include Ventro, the B-to-B portal formed by life-sciences expert
Chemdex last month that is charged with creating electronic marketplaces across
vertical industries; the privately held steel-industry exchange e-Steel; and the
plastics portal PolySort.
"We are working very hard with each of them," says Avcom CEO Brad Bishop.
"Every lab in the world that orders agar plates or test tubes or other lab needs goes
through Chemdex."
Third-party "market makers" like Chemdex--the pure-play dot-com B-to-B
companies--are one of the fastest growing segments of the B-to-B realm,
according to a variety of market watchers. Merrill Lynch is predicting this segment
will generate 15 percent to 20 percent of all B-to-B commerce, to the tune of
$400 billion to $500 billion, by 2003.
Merrill Lynch defines market makers as companies that "match buyers and sellers
more efficiently not only in vertical [industry-specific] markets such as paper,
plastics, chemicals and steel, but also in horizontal markets [functional] for products
and services used in all industries. ..." These market makers tend to use catalogs,
auctions, exchanges and/or community sites to conduct their business, Merrill
Lynch claims.
Several Weeks In The Making
Sun has been laying the foundation for i-Communities for several weeks. Sun last
week won pledges of support from several infrastructure providers and tools
vendors--including BEA Systems, Inprise, Rational Software and the KL
Group--for the Sun Development Framework, which is intended to spur the
development of "cross-platform solutions" by integrating and coordinating different
vendors' efforts.
Sun also announced what it says will be the first in a series of software bundles to
address both vertical and horizontal markets. "The whole e-business cycle is
coming on so fast that alliances are critical," says Reed Hornberger, director of
market development. "We have to figure out how to deal with the customer in real
time."
Sun is striking relationships with ISVs to allow customers to assemble bundles of
software from multiple vendors and immediately download the pieces involved. For
example, a Portals Essentials bundle combines software from OpenMarket, Lotus,
net.Genesis, Net Perceptions, TimesTen and Inktomi, although the foundation of all
bundles will be infrastructure products from i-Planet, the Sun-Netscape Alliance.
Bundles will be built and tested in "dot-com competency centers," and Sun will
recommend preferred integrators and service providers in addition to Sun and
i-Planet professional services. Ultimately Sun hopes to bolster its software
presence across Solaris, Linux and AIX.
Sun also has been pushing deeply discounted hardware and software at start-ups,
and it is now tightening relationships with those it deems strategic.
Bluetrain.com--which is about to launch both its company and its Sun
connection--says the attention from such a big vendor has been invaluable. "We
have a communication and collaboration type of tool used by large corporations,
and we'll be partnering with service providers to target small and medium
businesses," says CEO Jack Weixel. "It fits with Sun's plan to sell equipment
through service providers in the future."
The Web integrator iXL--which Sun has dubbed an i-Leader--counts Sun as an
important ally in its efforts to match customers with software and hardware vendors
and worthy start-ups, although the relationship has taken several months to
develop. IXL Ventures, which accelerates start-ups in exchange for equity,
accounts for a quarter of iXL's business.
"When we started working with Sun, what we desired was much broader and
different than what they were doing," says iXL's alliance manager Lorin Coles. "We
wanted technology access and support on Java, and we wanted the ISV piece--if
Sun is investing lots of money around an Ariba or a BroadVision, that's very
interesting to us. We see some of the hottest new technologies in the world, and we
have to decide how to play with companies from the technology perspective."
Meanwhile, Bishop is bullish on the prospects for WebHarbor. "Sun has been
pushing us for over a year to get the ASP community going--it lends itself to bigger
things. If you add all the vertical ASPs together you can cover every single market.
It's all software." |
