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Sun Raising Curtain on New Solaris

Posted on: Tuesday, 16 November 2004, 18:00 CST

Sun Microsystems on Monday was to unveil the latest version of its flagship computer operating system, Solaris. It also intended to offer a free version of the program to make it more attractive to corporate and academic users.

The program will not be commercially available until the end of January, Sun executives said Friday, but versions of Solaris 10 have been available for trial use for almost a year.

The pricing shift is an effort to put pressure on software competitors like Microsoft and Red Hat, the biggest distributor of the open-source operating system, Linux. The shift could also broaden the market for Solaris by making it easier to try out.

Sun now has about one million Solaris users around the world, according to an estimate by International Data Corp., the market research firm. "They're looking for ubiquity," said Jean Bozman, a computer industry analyst at IDC.

Pricing and support options offered by software providers have become increasingly complex as open-source software has become a viable option for use in running big corporate data centers. Companies like Red Hat, for example, generally distribute a free version of Linux, while charging a purchase license and support fees for a version that is more commonly used commercially.

Sun is trying to make its pricing attractive and to take advantage of the fact that it offers hardware, service and software on a one-stop-shopping basis, which some of its rivals cannot do.

The company, under the direction of its president, Jonathan Schwartz, is also pushing toward a range of new pricing schemes similar to those used in consumer industries like the cellphone and cable businesses.

"From a pricing perspective, Solaris will be less expensive in any category than our Linux competitors," said John Loiacono, Sun executive vice president for software. Service and support for Solaris 10 will cost between $120 and $360 a year for each licensed machine

Sun also offers a corporate software package for a fee of $100 per employee per year. Its version of Linux and Open Office, called Java Desktop, costs $50 a user annually.

Sun recently said it would offer, at the cost of $1 per processor hour, a wholesale utility computing service to be marketed to corporate users and software service providers like Salesforce.com.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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