* Microsoft, Sun detail how and where they are working together
The world of Windows networking is maturing – and that’s good for each of us. Last week, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Sun’s Scott McNealy shared the stage at a press conference announcing new collaboration efforts that will allow Windows servers and Solaris servers to interoperate. This is the first fruits of a 10-year technical collaboration agreement, announced in April 2004, that set the framework for increased cooperation between the companies to enable their products to work better together.
Back in April 2004, many industry pundits thought the collaboration agreement was simply a way for the two companies to push back from the brink of a number of lawsuits and few thought it would lead to actual concrete details. But there really is some substance to the cooperative effort. As McNealy said, “Sun and Microsoft are working together … and quite well at that.”
The major new effort revolves around cross-platform single sign-on, which is covered in detail in this week’s Identity Management newsletter (https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/index.html). But there were a number of other announcements made at the press conference last Friday, including in the areas of management, 64-bit computing, and systems integration.
The two competitors will collaborate on systems management to enable better interoperability between their operating systems and management products. They will work together on the development of WS-Management, a Web services specification, that defines a single protocol to meet management requirements spanning hardware devices, operating systems and applications. WS-Management is a key component of the Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative and will ship as a standard part of Windows Server 2003 starting with the R2 release later this year.
The Sun Fire x64 server for x64 systems and Sun Java Workstation product lines will carry the “Designed for Windows” logo. They have passed Microsoft’s compatibility testing suite and are listed in the Windows Catalogs. Sun and Microsoft also have an agreement to cooperate in providing Sun back-line support for Windows on Sun systems.
Large system integration companies (think Accenture, EDS and NEC for example) are being trained by both Sun and Microsoft to provide interoperability between the two companies’ products for the integrators’ customers.
Additionally, the companies announced that Sun has licensed Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol and will implement it in its Sun Ray ultra-thin client product line in the near future. This means that users of Sun Ray thin clients will now be able to access Windows Terminal Services running on Windows Server 2003.
There’s nothing particularly earth-shattering in any single announcement, but the scope – breadth and depth – of the cooperation is breathtaking.
