Sun, Microsoft Square Off For Enterprise,
E-Commerce
Sep 22, 2000 (Tech Web - CMP via COMTEX) -- Microsoft and Sun next
week will try to convince the world that their respective offerings should
be the linchpin of future enterprise and e-business deployments.
On Tuesday, Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., will host what
employees have dubbed "Serverpalooza" in San Francisco. There,
president Steve Ballmer will finally announce availability of Windows
2000 Data Center Edition, SQL Server 2000, and BizTalk Server 2000
among others.
A day later and 3,000 miles east, Microsoft archrival Sun Microsystems
Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., will address many of the same issues at its Net
Effects event in New York.
None of the Microsoft products is really new to anyone who has listened
to the company talk about them for the past two years. And, actual
shipment is also a relative term, since Data Center is an OEM-only
product. Exchange 2000 went to manufacturing a month ago but will not
formally ship till the Microsoft Exchange Conference Oct. 10. Still, the
event will tout the products and their ability to work together as the basis
for enterprise and Web e-commerce infrastructure. While Windows NT
and its newest iteration, Windows 2000, have taken departments by
storm, the event is designed to show that the 2000 lineup is a
respectable choice to run the enterprise.
Most enterprise-class servers still run some flavor of Unix. And Unix is
also the operating system of choice for heavy-duty Web servers.
Microsoft (MSFT) is characteristically late with these offerings, analysts
said. But where delay has served the company in the past, it may have
wounded them seriously this time around, they said.
"In this case, delay didn't work. They did not stall the market. This type of
[e-commerce] software is being sold into the higher-end supply chain
situations where Microsoft still isn't much of a factor," said Shawn Willett,
analyst with Current Analysis, Reston, Va. "Their only hope now is a
low-cost product, but even some of the smaller companies have come
out with their own low-cost or entry-level products."
In e-commerce, it is companies like Commerce One Inc. (CMRC) and
Ariba Inc. (ARBA) that have stolen marketshare from such entrenched
players as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard Co.
(HWP), observers said. Now those players are preparing their
counterattack.
Judith Hurwitz, president of The Hurwitz Group, Framingham, Mass.,
concurred. Microsoft is "trying to get traction behind .NET but has lost
momentum in B-to-B where other players have grabbed the market and
are now leading the charge," she noted. "Microsoft would like to take
back leadership but has a lot of work ahead."
Also, Microsoft's marketing of .NET has become fuzzier since the
departure of veteran executives who originally came up with the concept,
said Mike Gilpin, analyst for Giga Information Group, Cambridge, Mass.
Microsoft.NET was originally defined as enabling a service-based
architecture through loosely coupled integration of applications over the
Web.
"Now that everything they have has a 'dot-net' after it, suddenly dot-net
doesn't really mean what it did before, but instead just means the next
version of everything," Gilpin said. "You could almost say instead of
dot-net, it's 'dot-next.'"
Still, Microsoft will trot out some heavyweight partners in its run for the
Web and the enterprise. Hewlett-Packard, for one, will announce the
expansion of its NetServer to support 32 processors. The current
NetServers scale up to 8 Intel processors. HP, Palo Alto, Calif., is also
expected to stress that its Superdome "super-server" now based on
PA-RISC processors will run Microsoft's server software when the
IA-64-based models become available.
In New York, Sun (SUNW) executives led by president Ed Zander are
expected to fill in details of the newly announced UltraSPARC III chip
roadmap and to unveil a new UltraSPARC III-based workstation called
Sunblade. Until now, the workstation has been referred to by its code
name Excalibur. Officials with the company would not comment.
"The key message will be that Ultrasparc III has the architecture for the
dot-com world, that it will offer scalability, binary compatibility, and
bandwidth," said one source knowledgable of the plans.
With Microsoft setting its sights on the enterprise and the Net, where Sun
has done very well, no one thinks the timing of the two events is a
coincidence. "It is no accident that Microsoft and Sun are hosting events
a day apart," this source noted.
Sun is going into the event fresh on the heels of its announced
acquisition of Linux power Cobalt Networks Inc., Mountain View, Calif., a
move that left some observers wondering about the company's platform
of the future. "Will the company which has disrespected Linux actually
now offer it or will it slip UltraSPARC and Solaris into those appliances
and servers?" asked one skeptical observer.
CRN's Paula Rooney and TechWeb's Antone Gonsalves contributed to
this story.
techweb.com
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