Sun Software Chief Has Eye on Web Services

Sun Software Chief Has Eye on Web Services
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Sun Microsystems new head of software, Jonathan Schwartz, says company is poised to take lead in Web services arena.Sun Microsystems Inc.s new head of software this week put his organization into place and is focusing on key markets while promoting Sun as a leader in the Web services arena.

Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of software at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun, said Suns software group is focused on three main audiences: system operators, as in IT shops; system "deployers"; and developers.

Schwartz said Sun is poised to take a leadership role in providing a standard platform for Web services and will continue to draw developer and customer support with new Linux offerings and open-source initiatives.

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During a conference call this week where he took cue from Suns CEO, Scott McNealy, and took shots at Suns competition, Schwartz focused much of his attention on IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

Schwartz alluded to the application server arena as a rich battleground for developers and singled out IBMs WebSphere for attack.

"For IBM, most of their revenue for WebSphere has been on Solaris," Schwartz said. "We see Microsoft here, but for smaller business."

Schwartz said that at the edge of the Web, Sun will promote a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) solution to developers. LAMP, a generic open-source solution, is Suns Linux-based solution available on its newly released LX50 Intel-based machines running Linux or Solaris. Schwartz referred to Suns version as Sun LAMP. Apache is an open-source Web server, MySQL is an open-source database and PHP is an open-source language for creating middle-tier HTML applications.

"Our competition is Windows, but it will increasingly suffer from the economic model Linux will promote," Schwartz said.

While Sun will continue to drive large deployments to the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) infrastructure, the company will promote LAMP for less complex applications.

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