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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/09/sun_seebeyond_caps_launch/

Sun butts against IBM in integration

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco
Published Thursday 9th February 2006 16:02 GMT

Sun Microsystems is today expected to make the first fruits of its SeeBeyond Technologies acquisition available with software targeting IBM.

Sun is launching four separate modules as part of the new Java Composite Application Suite (Java CAPS), serving web, application and enterprise integration. Java CAPS updates the former SeeBeyond's Integrated Composite Application Network (ICAN) Suite.

Java CAPs updates SeeBeyond's integration stack by adding Sun's standards-based Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server and portal. The stack is also capable of deploying on JBoss' open source Java application server for the first time.

Java CAPs will be made available under Sun's familiar annual, subscription-based pricing metric of $100 per user per year for the full suite, or $50 per employee per year for each module. The suite is due at the end of March, with an update planned for the next six months as part of Sun's full Java Enterprise System (JES).

Sun, which has picked up business from existing Sun and SeeBeyond customers, believes the combination of pricing and the automation of integration using a standards-based Java application server and portal will help lower customers' integration costs.

Sun is claiming a 50 per cent gain in terms of productivity for those using its software and 20 per cent improvement in total cost of ownership (TCO) on integration.

Sun hopes to use this combination of price, TCO and automation against IBM's traditionally consultant-based approach.

Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for service oriented architecture (SOA) and integration platforms, said IBM is Sun's primary competitor on integration, but noted it is harder for IBM to be as flexible because its products use multiple code bases. "It's harder for them to be as flexible in terms of deployment," Keller said.

"Any time you need to make changes, there are fees and there is the time it takes [to make changes]. Many customers are looking to take back control of their architecture and development decisions," Keller said.

The four Java CAPS modules are: the Java Business to Business (B2B) Suite, Java Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Suite, Java Application Platform Suite, and the Java Web Infrastructure Suite. The B2B Suite is designed to allow integration across supply chains, ESB Suite provides message transformation and routing, Application Platform Suite supports AJAX and Wiki-based portals, while the Web Infrastructure Suite adds identity capabilities to web and proxy servers.®

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