On Sun's JES, software pricing and the tricksiness of PR
Even cynical organs like
The Register have picked up on Sun’s deal with GM (announced
here last week) and reported it as a milestone in the company’s bid to become seen as a mainstream enterprise software infrastructure player. But is there less to this than meets the eye?
Schwartz
often talks about Sun’s move towards simple subscription pricing, and (in some cases) no-cost pricing, for software as being a great catalyst for expanding Sun’s market – reaching new customers with Sun infrastructure technology. It’s never quite said, but Sun statements often strongly imply that the growth in Sun’s Java Enterprise Suite (JES) shipments is an indicator that this strategy is working.
And this is the point where my radar starts to twitch. I spoke to Jim McHugh of Sun earlier this week, who told me that GM was already using Sun’s Web Infrastructure Suite and Application Server Suite, and was shopping for identity management and single sign-on technology to help it make its numerous internal and external portals more sophisticated and secure. Now if GM was paying list for these technologies it was already spending around $32m. So the JES deal was really an upgrade of an already very significant investment in Java software from Sun (and, thanks to Schwartz’ friendly pricing model, an upgrade that likely saved it around $3.5m over buying all the components separately).
The deal was also described as enabling GM to be “the largest company to use Java ES to build a Service Oriented Architecture that delivers innovative, interoperable Web services while reducing development and maintenance costs.” But in reality it appears that what GM is actually committing to, is to use Sun’s
very capable identity management technology on top of its existing Java investments, and integrating this with its portals and other infrastructure using technology standards like
WSRP and
SAML.
So – first of all while this is clearly a good customer story for Sun I think it’s a tad disingenuous to talk about this deal in the context of a massive enterprise-wide SOA rollout. Equally concerning, though, is that what appears to be a major milestone in Sun’s enterprise Java play is in fact an expanded deal with an existing major user of Sun’s Java software.
This begs an important question: how much of the growth in JES subscriber numbers is really just re-categorisation of existing customer spend on Sun Java software? And how much of it is really an indicator of Sun expanding its market?
If anyone’s got any insight into this question I’d love to hear it.
