Weekly ASP Industry Review

Few major announcements in our industry are truly ground-breaking. Most are attempts to recoup market positioning that's already been ceded to competitors. These ground-covering exercises take existing technologies and platforms and repackage them in the latest industry buzzwords.

Sun's announcement of Sun ONE this week was a welcome endorsement of the move to Web services computing, but it was very much an exercise in catching up with the field rather than breaking new ground. See related story on internetnews.com, Sun Comes Out Slinging With Web Services Strategy, Feb 6th, 2001.

Sun already has a fine collection of Internet technologies and platforms, but has done a bad job of presenting them to the world. They were in dire need of a fresh lick of marketing paintwork, and this week's announcement was all about daubing a much-needed web services gloss on them, at the same time as adding a thick undercoat of previously absent XML respectability.

But even unveiling what amounts to little more than a new vocabulary is still an advance of sorts. The most significant innovation that Sun introduced on Monday was "smart Web services," a neat tagline for the flexible service components that lie at the heart of the emerging Web computing architecture.

"Smart web services are to the Information Age what interchangeable parts were to the Industrial Age," announced Sun's CEO Scott McNealy.

Smart Services
What makes these web services smart is that they separate their core software-driven functionality from the policy and profile information that governs how it is applied. Smart web services can modify their behavior based on factors such as the identity of person or entity requesting the service, the timing of the request, their location and permissions.

"At Sun we understand the importance of adding a policy of context, one where services have the ability to change their behavior based on the user they are serving and the environment they are serving the user in," explained Sun CTO Greg Papadopolous.

Separating out the contextual information from the core software procedures is a radical step, as described this week in the ASPnews column Breaking Software Out of the Box - an excerpt from an ASPnews report originally published a year ago. Because the business logic will no longer be hard-coded into the underlying software processes, it paves the way towards assembling applications on demand out of flexible Web services, rather than having to painstakingly reconstruct them for every new circumstance.

But despite McNealy's "Not Yet" jibes at the expense of Microsoft's rival .Net roadmap, Sun admits that its smart Web services vision is the least concrete part of this week's announcements. "The industry still needs to define standards in terms of context. That is still very much part of the vision and not part of the real world," Sun Software director of business strategy Anne Manes told ASPnews.

But it's important to help customers align their strategy today to position themselves for the missing piece, added iPlanet CTO Hal Stern. "The [part] that's missing is the [part] we believe will give the next wave of phenomenal growth. If you can understand today and tell people where to go, it's open for anyone to use and see the sort of growth we see," he told ASPnews.

Rewriting History
The rest of Sun's announcements were more concerned with rewriting history and renaming products to better position Sun for that next leap forward. Here are some of the more notable points:

• Naming the strategy ONE - for Open Net Environment - in itself ironically resurrected an acronym used by Netscape back in 1996 for its then strategic vision, Open Network Environment.
• Sun opened its arms to XML, for the first time clearly placing it alongside Java at the heart of Web services as the de facto standard for open document and data exchange formats. Not content to be seen as a bystander in the creation of such a core technology, it suddenly made much of the fact that XML was co-invented by a Sun engineer, Jon Bosak.
• Sun's StarPortal project, the long-promised Web-based implementation of the Star Office suite acquired in 1999 was renamed the Sun ONE Webtop. Developer release 1.0 is planned for broad availability by the end of the first quarter. (See Sun touts zero-cost Office, Sep 4th, 1999).
• Sun/Netscape alliance venture iPlanet relaunched its extensive and much-respected range of server platforms as a core part of the Sun ONE strategy. It released a new version of its portal server software that for the first time integrates knowledge management capabilities from its recent acquisition of KM specialist GrapeVINE. Sun also launched pre-configured hardware and software bundles of Sun servers running iPlanet's Web and application server platforms.
• Sun unveiled a two-year roadmap to incorporate evolving standards into existing product lines to enable smart Web services. It said that by 2002, the Sun ONE portfolio will fully support standards from W3C, the Java Community Process program, ebXML, Oasis and UDDI.

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