OL, Sun Micro to Give Details on Products From Their Alliance
New York, March 29 (Bloomberg) -- America Online Inc., the world's largest online service, and Sun Microsystems Inc. tomorrow will give details about the business software they'll sell as part of an alliance they unveiled in November.
The two companies are working together to sell software made by Netscape Communications Corp., which AOL acquired this month for $10.2 billion. The unit formed by the two companies will be called the Netscape Sun Alliance, said Mark Levitt, research director at International Data Corp., who's been briefed about the companies' plans.
Details about the cooperative arrangement have been dribbling out since it was disclosed. Tomorrow, the pair will tell the world how Netscape and Sun software will be combined and which products will be dropped in favor of others.
''The decisions they've made make sense,'' Levitt said. ''It's a good strategy.''
Palo Alto, California-based Sun and Dulles, Virginia-based AOL will hold a press conference tomorrow in New York to discuss their plans. Sun Chief Operating Officer Ed Zander and Barry Schuler, president of AOL's Interactive Services Group, will be among the presenters, the companies said.
Messaging Service
Among the product offerings from Sun and AOL is a unified messaging service that gathers electronic mail, facsimiles and voice mail so they're accessible from an Internet browser or a telephone, Levitt said. The product will be out next year.
That product and most of the others are aimed at Internet service providers, telephone companies and large corporations that run their own, vast internal networks, he said.
AOL and Sun plan to sell both Netscape and Sun products for the rest of this year, Levitt said. After that, some products will be combined and some will be dropped in favor of competing ones made by one of the two companies. Many of Sun's and Netscape's products are similar.
Much of the software that AOL and Sun discuss tomorrow will be server software, which tells computers how to run different systems, such as e-mail and group calendars.
Sun and AOL have chosen to use Netscape's Collabra software for collaboration in work groups, dropping Sun's chat server, Levitt said. The companies plan to have a new application server out by the end of this year. Applications servers handle various electronic-commerce and transaction duties.
Investors Hopeful
Investors are betting that the alliance with AOL will help Sun sell more of its high-powered computers, which are used to run Internet sites and large computer networks.
Sun shares rose 8, or 6.9 percent, to a record 124 1/2 in trading of 10.8 million. Earlier, the shares reached an all-time high of 125 1/8. The stock has risen 45 percent this year.
The AOL agreement '' will help them sell a lot more hardware,'' said David Wu, an analyst at ABN Amro Inc. in San Francisco, who rates Sun shares ''hold.''
AOL shares also rallied today, jumping 6 11/16 to 132 3/8.
AOL and Sun last week named Sun executive Mark Tolliver as president and general manager of the alliance. He was president of Sun's consumer embedded division. The companies named Barry Ariko, formerly Netscape's chief operating officer, as executive vice president and deputy general manager of the alliance.
) Mar/29/1999 18:32
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