June 29, 2004
Sun's new success formula: NPV
: Sun president Jonathan Schwartz believes the "ruthlessly competitive" pricing of the company's subscription model will be a disruptive force in the market. Fundamentally, Sun is hoping to commoditize the infrastructure required to service billions of client devices. At minimum, Sun's subscription pricing model will force other vendors to rethink their pricing and bundling scenarios. At maximum, it will resurrect Sun's fortunes. ...

June 21, 2004
Face to Face: Vint Cerf
More than 30 years ago, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn hatched the underlying protocol of the Internet--TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). The Internet took more than 20 years to reach a mass audience, but in the last seven years the population of Web users has gone from 50 million to more than 800 million. Cerf, who is also senior vice president of technology strategy at MCI, continues to steward the Internet in his role as chairman of (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the international organization responsible for IP address space allocation, top-level domain name system management, root server system management, and other functions. ...

June 8, 2004
Federation acceleration
Federated identity is beginning to gain some traction among corporations, according to a survey. Most wanted by respondents: single-sign on for partners, ease-of-integration and vendor interoperability. ...

June 2, 2004
Mainsoft unites .Net and Java programming
Software developer Mainsoft's development environment allows .Net programmers to create fully compliant, Java 1.4 bytecode without learning the Java language. At $5,000 per developer seat and a yearly 20 percent maintenance fee, Visual MainWin for J2EE can be a lot cheaper than hiring expensive and often scarce Java developers....

June 2, 2004
Blades: 2004 and beyond
Blades servers continue to gain acceptance in enterprises as companies look to server consolidation to lower costs and increase utilization. IDC is predicting that blades will rise from about 4 percent of servers sold to at least 25 percent by 2008. Blade servers include processors and memory on a single board, but cooling, power, storage, and network connections are accessed through a backplane and can be shared among a collection of blades. For companies that need a flexible and more manageable model for scaling out server capacity, blades should be given careful consideration....

June 1, 2004
Sun pushes to innovate and disrupt IBM
Now that Sun has buried the hatchet with Microsoft, CEO Scott McNealy's verbal barbs are targeting IBM's product family and global services organization. McNealy's goal is to transform Sun's R&D investments into disruptions that benefit customers and stockholders, and cause pain for competitors. When McNealy can say that server sales are no longer the leading success indicator, Sun will have done something truly innovative and disruptive. ...