Sun will offer back-line support for OpenOffice
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InfoWorld - Sun plans to announce on Monday that it will provide support for the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, citing a wave of momentum behind the open-source project.
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Hewlett-Packard&#39;s new OpenView software is designed to help companies automate IT responses to business events, such as a jump in order-processing transactions.
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Sun is expected Tuesday to ship xVM Ops Center, a datacenter automation console compatible with Linux- and Solaris-based x86 and Sparc environments.Ops Center&#39;s features include automatic installation of firmware and bare-metal operating systems; scanning and tracking of servers in a network; and patch-management tools for SUSE, Red Hat, and Solaris, according to a company statement.James Staten, an analyst with Forrester Research, said the last feature is particularly compelling, but not enough to attract a great deal of new business to Sun&#39;s platform.&quot;The patching mechanism they have is very impressive and works with both Linux and Solaris, but given that this is a 1.0 product the appeal will remain mainly with existing Sun customers,&quot; he said via e-mail Friday.&quot;It&#39;s a substantially better entry in systems management than their previous attempts, and much more open,&quot; he added.The Ops Center codebase has already been released under the open-source GPLv3 license and is available at www.openxVM.org.Sun previously said the first commercial version of Ops Center would be available on Jan. 8.Oren Teich, director of product management and marketing for xVM, said the company needed additional time to make some final tweaks and improvements in areas including firmware provisioning and reporting, following requests from early beta users.He disagreed with the notion that mainly existing Sun customers will buy the software, saying the company expects that sales will be split between current and new users. While it is a 1.0 release, code from two existing Sun products, N1 System Manager and Sun Connection, are running under the hood of Ops Center&#39;s GUI, he said. &quot;In some ways, this is a very mature project.&quot;Yet the first version has a key omission: support for Windows. &quot;Although Windows support is not currently available, we&#39;re committed to offering it in the future,&quot; Teich said.Sun is also developing xVM Server, a bare-metal, Xen-based hypervisor with support for Linux, Solaris and Windows guest operating systems.While Sun&#39;s xVM brand stands for &quot;the intersection of virtualization and management,&quot; according to Teich, the Ops Center 1.0 release does not feature a broad range of functionality around virtualization. This summer, Sun will release its hypervisor product and &quot;an update to Ops Center that will have a lot of virtualization capabilities on top of it,&quot; Teich said.The company will battle along with leader VMware, Oracle, Microsoft and an array of other vendors for a stake in the virtualization space, which analysts have pegged as remaining wide-open despite the voluminous hype around the topic in recent years.With Ops Center, Sun will go up against IT management powerhouses such as HP and IBM.Subscription pricing for Ops Center, with support and network-delivered services, ranges between $100 and $350 per managed server per year.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Rational on Thursday is announcing plans to provide technical support for the Eclipse open source tools platform, thus giving customers a single point of contact for both open source and IBM's commercial technologies for software development. IBM will also unveil plans for upcoming tools geared to the new Eclipse 3.2 platform, and it is rolling out online developer resources for Eclipse users. IBM is making the announcements at the EclipseWorld conference in Cambridge, Mass. Through its IBM Rational Elite Support for Eclipse program, IBM will for the first time provide support for raw Eclipse tooling, said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy at IBM Rational. Tools also will be provided. IBM previously supported IBM Rational products that are based on Eclipse but not for Eclipse tools themselves. Users will be assisted with issues such as solving defects and getting questions answered. IBM Rational, rather than the IBM Global Services group will provide support. "This is an opportunity for the IT managers and development managers to provide a unified support structure," Hebner said. Eclipse users not working with IBM Rational products also can sign up for the Eclipse support. IBM officials noted users are doing mission-critical work and want more accountability for support rather than just relying on the community at large. "They're happy with the level of tooling [from Eclipse]. They're not happy with building [solutions] alone," said Gary Cernosek, offerings manager for analysis, design and construction at IBM Rational. Eclipse 3.2 features Java 5 support, refactoring and a preview of support for the Windows Vista OS. Version 3.2 debuted in July. IBM also will support some Eclipse projects, such as the Web Tools Platform, Test and Performance Tools Platform, and the Eclipse Modeling Framework. With its support effort, IBM is addressing the downside that enterprises face when opting to develop with free, open source tools. according to analyst Bola Rotibi, of Ovum. "The problem many customers have or many enterprises have is not so much from that point of view [of using open source tools], it's when things go wrong," Rotibi said. "IBM is basically saying, well, OK, we understand this issue and [you need] a unified support approach or a unified support framework," Rotibi said. The support program costs $400 per developer for a one-year subscription for unlimited calling. Support will be available in the fourth quarter of this year. IBM at the show also is announcing a preregistration effort for participating in beta programs for three upcoming products based on Eclipse 3.2. These products are Lotus Designer 6, which is a rapid application development tool to build components to run WebSphere Portal 6.0; IBM Rational Software Architect Release 7, for UML (Unified Modeling Language) modeling, and IBM Rational Functional Tester 7, for automated testing. Tools improve the ability to visually construct services for SOA. Enhanced support for geographically distributed development also is a highlight. Rational Software Architect also features modeling for code reconciliation and Functional Tester can be used to test services, business processes and SAP applications. IBM's new tools ship by the end of the year. New resources on IBM's developerWorks site are in the Eclipse and Rational skill zones. These resources help developers build skills in Eclipse 3.2 and include a course on building "cheat sheets" Eclipse 3.2, for performing complex Eclipse tasks. Education, tutorials and resources are featured for Eclipse 3.2.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday unveiled an upgrade of its thin-client platform, which enables access to corporate applications and data through broadband-enabled home and satellite offices.
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Sun Microsystems hopes to make MySQL's open-source database more attractive to enterprise customers. But some existing MySQL users say Sun has a lot of work ahead of it.
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Acquisition of one of the most successful open-source software companies is a bold move for Sun, which has embraced open source to try to boost revenue.
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TechWeb - Sun's recent decision to open-source some elements of Java is pretty exciting -- but a few years overdue, says &lt;i&gt;InformationWeek&lt;/i&gt; columnist Eric A. Hall
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(InfoWorld) - After years of holding out, IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft's Office software. IBM has been using code from the project in its development of productivity applications it included in Lotus 8, the latest version of its collaboration suite, but until now had not been an official member of the community, said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for the Lotus division at IBM. The company now will contribute its own code to the project and be more visible about its work to integrate OpenOffice.org into Lotus, he said. Heintzman acknowledged that theÂ International Organization for Standardization's (ISO's) recent vote to reject Microsoft's Open XML file format as a technology standardÂ was one reason IBM decided to join the effort. OpenOffice.org uses ODF (Open Document Format), a rival file format to Open XML that is already an ISO technology standard. IBM is one of the companies pushing for the use of ODF in companies and government organizations that are creating mandates to only use technology based on open standards in their IT architectures. "They are certainly related," he said of the ISO vote and IBM's decision to join OpenOffice.org. "We think that it's now time to make sure there is a public code base that implements this spec so we can attract a critical mass to build these new value propositions." Sun founded OpenOffice.org and offers its own commercial implementation of the suite, called StarOffice. The company, a long-time IBM competitor in the hardware and software markets, also has been the primary contributor to the code, one of the reasons IBM balked for so long before joining the group. "[The community] has had some challenges in recruiting an awful lot of big names to support the activity, but [now] we think there are some that can provide an example to us all to provide a vibrant place to add value," Heintzman said. "We hope that our voice at the table will help us evolve the community." Intellectual-property attorney and well-known ODF supporter Andrew Updegrove noted that the ISO's decision andÂ recent interest in StarOffice by GoogleÂ may have been enough to inspire IBM to set aside any competitive differences with Sun and work with them to promote OpenOffice.org as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Momentum from the ISO's rejection of Open XML is a prime opportunity for OpenOffice.org to become a real alternative to Office, he said. "Most likely, the setback for [Open XML] ... and Google's announcement a month ago that it would include StarOffice 8 in its free Google Pack download figure into IBM's decision," Updegrove wrote in an e-mail to the mailing list for his Standards Blog. "Those events help provide the type of public momentum that ... offer the prospect for the type of greater rewards that help displace other considerations and historical impediments. Whatever the reasons may have been that have kept Sun and IBM from working together to support OpenOffice over the past four years more fully, the reality is that a chance to break an industry monopoly that generates $15 billion in revenues a year comes only once in a generation -- when it comes at all." In a press statement, Sun welcomed IBM's addition to the group, which claims it has had 100 million downloads of its software since it launched in 2000.
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Beta users can access the OpenOffice.org suite using a Web browser on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X--no download necessary.
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InfoWorld - Sun is expected to announce next week that it will make the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) device platform available via open source, but a user expressed concerns about Sun's commitment to the technology.
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Maker of the WordPerfect word processor and productivity suite will support Microsoft's Office Open XML, OpenDocument format.
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After years of holding out, IBM Corp. Monday has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.&#39;s Office software.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is to offer the world a free word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program in yet another bid to upset the dominance of Microsoft's Office suite. The move sounds ambitious, but Microsoft is unlikely to be trembling in fear just yet --Â Lotus Symphony,Â as it will be known, is really just a re-packaging of the OpenOffice suite that has taken only fringe market share from Microsoft, since being taken under the wing of Sun seven years ago. IBM says it will contribute 35 programmers to the Symphony-cum-OpenOffice development effort, in a bid to spark new interest in a software suite that can trace its ancestry back to a suite called StarOffice, once owned by obscure German company, Star. IBM hopes its much larger corporate presence will generate more success this time. "IBM is very pleased to beÂ joining the OpenOffice.org community.Â We are very optimistic that IBM's contribution of technology and engineering resources will provide tangible benefits to the community membership and to users of OpenOffice.org technology around the world," said Mike Rhodin, of IBM's Lotus Division. "We welcome IBM's contributions to further enhancing the OpenOffice.org product. But equally important is IBM's future commitment to package and distribute new works that leverage OpenOffice.org technology supporting the ISO ODF standard," said John McCreesh of OpenOffice. IBM has been here before. In 1995, it paid $3.5 billion for Lotus Development, complete with its suite of high-regarded office applications, only for those programs to fall of the map completely as it focused on selling the OS/2 groupware, Lotus Notes, in a nice twist itself once a creation of current Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie. OpenOfficeÂ has launched version 2.3 just of its suite bang on cue for IBM's endorsement. TechworldÂ is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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At yesterday&#39;s official launch of the new Solaris 10 operating system in San Jose, Calif., Sun executives said Solaris will be issued next January under an &quot;open-source&quot; licensing plan similar to that used by the rival operating system Linux and the
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SEPTEMBER 14, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Sun Microsystems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. next month plan to provide more details on the work they are doing to make their products interoperable, a Sun executive said yesterday.
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Sun said Thursday that it had released Java Enterprise System 5.0, a set of subscription-based services that complement enterprise operating systems like the company's own Solaris 10.