Sun's New Business Model

by Manish Kumar Srivastava

Sun Microsystems has released its operating system (Solaris 10) and Java Enterprise System (JES) under a new subscription scheme in which the customer gets the entire enterprise software stack for free, and support is charged on a per-employee-per-year basis instead of the typical per-processor-per-user model. The JES contains Sun's portal server, application server, identity server, Web server, clustering software, and some other similar products. These software components can also be packaged into different software suites depending on your needs; this has the same per-employee-per-year licensing model as the full JES, though the support fees will be slightly lower.