Sun Microsystems recently released more of its technology under the open-source licence agreement - a Java programming environment called Forte for Java, which Sun acquired when it purchased Forte Software last year.
However, Java is not the reason for Sun's $500 million acquisition.
Forte and its products have been integrated into Sun's Software Tools division, which includes other software products including Java, Solaris and multi-platform office suite Star Office.
"Java is a door-opener for Sun," says Forte director Peter Parker. "Java is not strong enough by itself for high-end enterprise."
To help Java climb the ever-important tier ladder, Forte hopes to help Sun make the cross-platform language secure and stable enough for the high-end marketplace. Parker envisions a portal-style development environment, hosted by application service providers and changing the fundamentals of the development world.
Java may have been a door-opener into the middle-tier for Sun, but it needed a strategy to crack into the stringent upper-tier market, where legacy systems sit next to complex enterprise resource planning environments, and hundreds of semi-compatible and incompatible applications transmit information to and from massive data centres.
Sun has penetrated this market with its large servers and its Solaris operating system, but its greatest success with this technology has been in the middle market. What Sun really wanted from Forte was not its Java technology - it wanted its middleware, Forte Fusion.
Based on XML standards, Forte believes Fusion is the answer to enterprise's heterogeneous headaches. "Forte Fusion offers Sun a whole new set of opportunities," says Parker. "It will allow Sun into HP, IBM and other competitor-dominated accounts," he claims.
Forte has already had some success in the Southern African market without Sun's help, including accounts like Namibia Justice, NBS and Sun Couriers - which until recently owned the sun.co.za domain. However, it plans to take different routes to market, with a local presence, Sun's sales backing and a few new partners, rather than the single distributor strategy it utilised in the past.
Forte says that its Fusion product offers true enterprise connectivity, not just system-by-system translation like messaging-oriented middleware. Another advantage, says Parker, is that his middleware does not need the involved customisation that other offerings require to get systems talking.
"There are 22 pre-built adapters for common systems, like SAP, Baan, PeopleSoft, and others," says Parker, and adds that more can be built if the customer needs it.
"Everything in our product is standards-based, which we've found very beneficial when integrating environments," says Parker. The customer will also find it beneficial if rolling out a new solution that already supports XML, as the new system should theoretically slot into the Fusion environment.
While Parker describes Forte Fusion as a "beachhead" for Sun, the IT vendor has a greater plan than simply shouldering into the competition's accounts. Once the foot is in the door, Sun has to offer the enterprise a great deal more to hold its attention.
With its open-source products and the Sun/Netscape alliance (which recently produced the iPlanet products), it will be able to offer enterprise a one-stop e-commerce solution, integrated with the company's back-office environment. It is currently working on an open framework design to allow developers to plug into a development environment, similar to the San Francisco project's development idyll and the Corba/COM reality.
"Sun won't stop with Forte," says Parker. "We can expect it to buy more software companies soon." These purchases will likely continue Sun's strategy, which is, in the words of Sun Microsystems SA MD Christopher de Beyer: "For any organisation considering dot.comming their business... Sun has the most comprehensive set of building blocks available today in the industry."
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