Users see slow progress on Microsoft-Sun alliance

December 6, 2004—The progress report that Microsoft and Sun Microsystems issued on their joint initiatives left some IT managers and analysts wondering when or if the long-term collaboration that the two companies have promised will produce any substantial results.

Executives from the onetime bitter rivals cited collaborative efforts in areas such as Web services standards, identity management, storage, and the optimization of Windows for Sun hardware. But much of the work is ongoing, and Microsoft and Sun didn’t provide details about any major technology pronouncements that may be forthcoming.

“My expectation on them producing deliverables is very low,” said Emanuel Joseph, data center manager at Lord, Abbett & Co., a Jersey City, N.J.-based mutual funds firm. Joseph added that he thinks the long history of conflict between Microsoft and Sun will make it difficult for them to build interoperable products.

Stan Johnson, a Portland-based LAN services manager for Multnomah County in Oregon, said he would like to have a single management console that he could use to populate or oversee end-user accounts in Microsoft’s Active Directory and on Sun systems.

But Johnson remains skeptical about the long-term potential of the Sun-Microsoft alliance. “They’re moving in the right direction, but I still think, right now, they have their own turf that they’re interested in,” he said. “So I’m not sure where it’s going to pan out.”

To be convinced that the alliance will produce results, Johnson said, he needs to see “a real product in hand that shows the collaboration,” rather than just hear the vendors talk about their joint work.

Looking for meaning

Several analysts said they heard nothing new in the first progress report that the two companies issued since their April announcement of a broad cooperation agreement, which also included a payment of nearly billion from Microsoft to Sun to settle outstanding litigation between them.

Tom Bittman, an analyst at Gartner, said the update was issued with “a defensive rationale” to help the vendors prove that they’re collaborating. Bittman said he has no doubts that they’re working together against their primary competitor, IBM. But he added that he isn’t sure it matters anymore “because Sun’s influence isn’t nearly as strong as it used to be.”

“In terms of real progress, you’d have to search hard to find anything. I didn’t really hear anything meaningful at all,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst at Enderle Group in San Jose. He said he thinks the two companies may never have intended to cooperate much beyond their initial agreement, which gave Sun a cash infusion and allowed Microsoft to free itself from antitrust and patent lawsuits.

Hank Vigil, vice president of consumer strategy and partnerships at Microsoft, objected to the vendors’ collaboration efforts being characterized as modest in scope. “If you think about the history between Sun and Microsoft, it was quite a contentious history, where our ability to even talk to each other was not at all clear,” he said. “I think that the eight months have proven not only are we crawling well, but we’re learning how to walk, and someday we expect to run together.”

Similarly, Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer at Sun, described the change in the nature of his company’s relationship with Microsoft as “a 180-degree U-turn.”

The vendors have held 15 executive meetings in the past five months, including talks between Papadopoulos and Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect, and between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Sun CEO Scott McNealy.

Two-dozen engineers are also meeting face to face on a monthly basis to discuss technical issues, according to Andrew Layman, director of distributed systems and interoperability at Microsoft.

Papadopoulos pointed out that he and Gates have also met jointly with an unspecified number of major customers. The users helped the companies get their priorities straight, said Papadopoulos, adding that they listed IT security, identity management, Java, and better interoperability through Web services as issues that are important to them.

Several users agreed that it would be helpful for Sun and Microsoft to work on those technologies. Roger Wilding, a senior technical engineer at a global transportation company that he asked not be identified, said it has been hard to get Java to work well on Windows-based systems. As a result, his company needs the interoperability that Web services technology promises.

Chuck Howard, a business development manager at Texas Farm Bureau Insurance Cos. in Waco, said he would like to see additional integration of Microsoft’s .Net technology and J2EE.