Yesterday, Sun announced that it is giving away the Solaris Enterprise System. This includes the Application Platform Suite (J2EE App Server, Portal Server, JMS), Identity Management Suite, Availability Suite (Clustering), Infrastructure Suite (Directory Server, Proxy Server), Communications Suite (Calendar, Messaging, Instant Messaging), Integration Suite (BPM, BAM, ETL), Java Studio (NetBeans), and N1 (Service Provisioning).
It seems like basically its giving away the whole store and turning to the support model (like JBoss). Software infrastructure has really turned the corner and become a commodity item now that a major commerical vendor is giving it away. Before, you could only get these things for free from open source projects.
How much of a threat is this to Microsoft? Probably not much in the short run. Microsoft technology and Java technology doesn’t really overlap. But, the ones that’ll get impacted more are the ones that sell competing Java technology like BEA. Why pay millions for licenses of Weblogic, WLES, and Portal when you can have it for free and also be able to get support from a major vendor?
In the long run, I think a lot of people will convert over to the free/open source enterprise software. Individuals can now download and play around with some pretty heavy duty enterprise software. IT shops can save bundles by not having to pay license fees.
The money now is not in selling enterprise software. But, the money is in customization and support. Companies will still have the need for someone to write custom software. And they will also pay for support.
How will Sun come out? If it plans on offering customization, then I think its got a good future. But, if it remains in just hardware and offering support, then it’ll just be treading water. And probably a likely candidate for a bigger boat to scoop it up too.