So what about iPlanet and Innosoft, anyway?
 
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The iPlanet directory server has a simple past. It is the iPlanet repackaging of the Netscape directory server. Netscape offered the first commercial LDAP-only directory server when the company introduced its Smart Suite four years ago, and their early position has given them a 75% market share of the LDAP business. When iPlanet was formed as an alliance between Sun and Netscape last year, keeping the Netscape server as part of the iPlanet offering was a no-brainer. Sun did not have its own server and when it had offered a directory server, it had licensed the Netscape server anyway.
Netscape got such an early lead by hiring away from the University of Michigan part of the team, which produced the first LDAP server. Soon after, Innosoft (a developer of backbone mail systems and X.500 directories) built its own LDAP directory team, basing their LDAP directory server product on the same code base used by Netscape.
Sun, in the mean time, had already built a relationship with Innosoft, selling Innosoft's mail technology as part of their popular Sun Internet Mail Server. Just before this review went to press, Sun acquired Innosoft, bringing the Innosoft intellectual property into the iPlanet alliance.
iPlanet has announced plans to migrate Innosoft IDDS customers to the iPlanet directory server. However, Innosoft offers other LDAP tools, including an XML-to-LDAP gateway, an LDAP proxy server, a distributed LDAP management toolkit, and, ironically enough, an LDAP-to-X.500 tool which makes LDAP data available to X.500 clients and servers. Innosoft has not published specific plans for the integration of these tools into the iPlanet product line, but it is likely that they will be available either as built-in tools to the iPlanet directory server, or as separate products offered by iPlanet.
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