Sun-Microsoft agreement breeds anticipation of integration

• Tags:
• Improve,
• Customer,
• Environment,
• Integration

David Becker CNET News

Published: 11 May 2004 15:15 BST

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"We're looking at how can we go beyond that, whether that's standards we promulgate together or active cooperation on products," Fowler said. "We're still competitors -- we're not here to promote .Net. But we have to realise our customers need to work in a mixed world."

Gordon Haff, an analyst for research firm Illuminata, said there will continue to be a basic Web services split between Sun and Microsoft on developers tools -- Microsoft's C# versus Sun's Java -- but customers increasingly expect the resulting applications to work together.

"You may very well continue to have multiple ways of developing applications," Haff said. "The important thing is, can those applications talk to each other on a meaningful level? That's going to happen at some level because customers are demanding it. They're saying, and rightly so, that the underlying details of how Web services are implemented shouldn't really matter that much."

And the big computing companies need to listen to customers, said analyst Matt Rosoff, as it becomes increasingly difficult to push new technology.

"It's getting harder and harder with each passing year to explain to businesses why they should upgrade," said Rosoff, an analyst for research firm Directions on Microsoft. "Sun and Microsoft understand they're in the same boat. They're thinking about what do they need to do to really compel upgrades, and interoperability is a big part of that."

Law firm CIO Conlon said that his company has focused on Java for initial work on Web services but that compatibility with .Net would provide useful reassurance going forward.

"If they can agree on a Web services framework, I think that would be a real plus," he said. "Our target architecture is a Java-based one -- there's just more third-party support for it... But it would be good to know our choices aren't going to be limited."

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