As expected, Sun Microsystems Inc kicked off its StarPortal early access program yesterday, announcing, for the first time, a list of partners who will participate in the trials. But the list fell short of the 50 or so partners Sun that said it would announce and it did not include AT&T, @Home and American Online Inc, as the company’s CEO Scott McNealy had earlier this month boasted it would.
Instead, Sun said US West and Bell Atlantic will be among the first companies to register as participants, and in an addendum at the back of the press release, it named six other partners; a far cry from the numbers Sun has been touting. Earlier this month, Marcus Boerries, Sun’s VP and general manager for webtop and application software, told ComputerWire the early access program would include around 50 ISPs, ASPs and portal partners and somewhere between three and 10 enterprise customers. Speaking to ComputerWire yesterday, however, a spokesperson denied Sun was reneging on its promises and said that more partners were currently being finalized and would be announced in January.
She said this was just the first phase of the program and that a second phase would follow in due course. Under phase one, the StarPortal code has been frozen, Sun said, and a limited number of customers and partners have been chosen to work with Sun to test the software and help get it integrated as part of their offerings. As part of phase two, the program will be opened up to additional partners who will be enrolled to deploy actual pilots and perform beta testing. This will precede the final StarPortal release, which is due for Spring 2000, Sun said.
StarPortal is the web-enabled version of Sun’s StarOffice suite of applications, which the company acquired from Hamburg, Germany-based Star Division last August. The applications, including word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation software, will be offered by ISPs, ASPs, content and portal provides, such as Yahoo! Inc, on a hosted basis over the internet. Sun is not charging its partners for the software but it will take a cut of any revenues those companies may make by charging their customers for StarPortal. In response to Sun’s move, Microsoft Corp last month released a hosted version of its rival product, Office.
