Sun mounts attack on desktop
By Dana Gardner, Stacy Collett, and Stewart Deck
InfoWorld Electric and Computerworld
Posted at 12:37 PM PT, Aug 30, 1999
Sun will pull a one-two punch on the corporate client market
over the next two weeks by announcing both
software and hardware moves to challenge the Wintel stronghold of
commercial desktops.
On Tuesday in New York, Sun is expected to announce the acquisition of
Star Division and its StarOffice 5.1 suite of
Java-based productivity applications and will add them to Sun's growing
arsenal of "dot-com" products for ISPs,
application service providers (ASPs), and enterprises, according to
sources.
In scooping up Star's technology, Sun acquires not only a line of
downloadable thin-client Java productivity applications, but
a slew of multiplatform client applications.
The company will follow its Star acquisition with the announcement of its
latest play in the thin-client hardware market.
Twice knocked down in the thin-client market but not out of contention,
Sun on Sept. 8 will unveil a new "information
appliance" that sheds the Java-only mentality of its previous workstations.
The product is expected to be more robust than Sun's previous
JavaStations and rely exclusively on Sun servers for their
applications. The biggest change for Sun, however, is that the appliance
will run a variety of cross-platform applications,
not just Java applications.
And Sun's pending purchase of Star will provide the linchpin that makes
its thin clients useful.
Star Division's office applications, called StarOffice, run on Windows,
Unix, Solaris, Java, and other platforms. And
StarOffice is better than Java software at incorporating the formats of
Microsoft Office applications such as PowerPoint,
Word, and Excel.
Industry observers said software has always been a critical issue with
JavaStations.
"The early attempts at Java computers were doomed to failure because
there just wasn't software that provided a
compelling case for end-users to use it," said Tom Austin, an analyst at
Gartner Group, in Nashua, N.H.
Sun unveiled its first JavaStation in late October 1996. The $1,000
first-edition machine had 8MB of RAM and ran
Java-based applications.
In March 1998, Sun announced the commercial availability of the retooled
JavaStation at $699. Customers, including
AlliedSignal and PHP Healthcare, signed up for the devices, but overall
sales were slow because of the lack of
applications.
Sources said Sun will position the new models as front ends for ASPs,
processing, and call center operations. New
Mexico Mutual Casualty is testing the appliances for claims processing.
Litton Data Systems, Bell Atlantic, British
Telecommunications, and the U.S. Navy's San Diego-based software
development unit are also beta deployers. Those
users declined interview requests.
Some industry watchers said it might be difficult for Sun to penetrate a
market in which Microsoft and Citrix Systems --
which provides the thin-client operating system to run Microsoft
applications -- are entrenched. Nevertheless, the timing of
Sun's thin-client announcement is likely intended to detract from Citrix'
iForum user's conference on the same day in
Orlando, Fla.
Sun will have trouble "unless they have a specific target market that
will find their technology extremely useful very
quickly," said Dave Friedlander, an analyst at Giga Information Group, in
Cambridge, Mass.
Others said opportunities for Sun will extend beyond their own thin
clients.
"I'm excited about the possibility of Sun offering this as a chunk of
software that every appliance [server vendor] can
offer. That's what they intend to do," said Kimball Brown, an analyst at
Dataquest, in San Jose, Calif.
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