Sunday January 24, 3:01 pm Eastern Time
Sun to unveil much-vaunted Jini technology
By Therese Poletti
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc. will formally unveil on Monday a much-vaunted new technology called Jini that seeks to make connecting any computing device to a computer network as easy as plugging in a telephone.
Sun will announce that 35 companies -- from disk-drive makers like Seagate Corp. and Quantum Corp. to consumer electronics giants Philips Electronics and Sony Corp. to printer behemoth Hewlett-Packard Co. -- are licensing the technology, which it hopes will be used in everything from printers to television set-top boxes to dishwashers.
Jini, which has already garnered much media attention, is software that Sun hopes will make computers and all kinds of devices much easier to use. Sun's Java programming language, which lets programmers write an application once to run on many systems, is the core of the Jini technology.
A Jini-enabled device works by announcing itself to the network, which will immediately be able to understand what kind of device was just plugged in and what kind of software drivers are necessary and the capabilities of the device.
''That is the goal, to make it as simple and as intuitive as how you use your telephone and your cellphone,'' said Mike Clary, general manager for Jini.
For a few years, Jini was a top-secret project, headed by Bill Joy, Sun's co-founder and now chief scientist, who works in a remote Sun location in Aspen, Colo. Almost two years ago, more engineers joined the project, including Jim Waldo, now Jini's chief architect with a team of about 45 engineers.
Sun plans to offer Jini in a community source code model, similar to what it has done with the Java language. The code is free to software developers who are working in research or using Jini for their own internal deployment.
If a company has a commercial use of Jini, it will pay Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun a nominal licensing fee, for the use of its Jini logo to cover the trademark costs, of either 10 cents per unit or $250,000 per year, per product line.
Some of the companies are expected to have products incorporating Jini rather soon, such as Quantum, which is expected to have a Jini-ready disk drive this year. But analysts and industry executives said Jini is still in its very early stages in the new technology product cycle.
''This is a real immature marketplace,'' said Rod Smith, director of Internet technology at International Business Machines Corp. ''Our joy is to participate to sort things out ... There are parts of Jini that are in pretty good shape.''
IBM, Microsoft Corp. and Lucent Technologies Inc. are also working on technologies with a goal of connecting disparate devices on a network. Smith said that IBM's T-Spaces project is complementary with Jini because T-Spaces lets computers and devices share network services such as messages, database queries, and print jobs.
''Jini represents a whole new economic opportunity for these people who get involved,'' said Clary, adding that Jini will make it easier for companies to offer network services that have not been possible before.
For example, Kinko's, the chain of printing and computing centers, plans an application where one Kinko's outlet can have a document printed in a remote city for someone else to pick up. Bosch Siemens in Germany plans a dishwasher that can be remotely diagnosed for problems by technicians.
''Jini is a great idea, but Sun has a ton of work to do to get it into something I can buy,'' said Eric Brown, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. ''Sun is outstanding in technology vision, and like Java, they now have execution on their plate ... (But) I would not hold my breath for Jini this year.''
Competition from other technologies, such as the recently announced Universal Plug and Play effort from Microsoft, could also cause some confusion and may foster a wait-and-see attitude in the industry, analysts said.
''(Microsoft) still has to deal with the legacy and the installed base of the millions of PCs out there,'' said David Smith, a Gartner Group analyst. ''When you start with a clean slate, such as Sun has with Java, you can do a lot of things.''
Sun said that it is making the Jini technology source code available on Monday and some of the first products will be available later this year and in 2000, targeted to the small home office market.
''Initially, we will see it in the small office/home office market, where they don't have professionals configuring this stuff (networks),'' Clary said. ''Then we will see it as these networks invade the home.''
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