JES 2004Q2, announced at Sun’s latest quarterly product announcement event yesterday, is available to governments in less and least developed nations for between $0.33 to $1.95 per citizen per year.
Factors determining final price are number of citizens and stage of the country’s development, as defined by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
Sun is working to challenge, and undercut, rivals in middleware, server, desktop, developer tools and hardware while also establish a reoccurring revenue model using subscription-based pricing for JES and Java Desktop System (JDS) [see separate story]. JES, available in January, is available to commercial customers at $100 per employee per year.
Commenting on Sun’s move to subscriptions and reoccurring pricing, and it implications for the competition, company chief executive Scott McNealy said: We don’t’ want people to follow us, we want to go places they can go… I don’t know how Microsoft gives away a free Dell server with developer tools. I’m not looking for check, I’m not looking for check mate.
JES includes Sun’s server products, for application server, portlet, directory and identity, and was updated yesterday to feature support for Linux, going beyond Sparc and x86 Xeon and Opteron. Also updated was Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition 7 2004Q2, with Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) failover and scalability to more than 112 CPUs.
Features also include high-availability with Sun Cluster 3.1 4/04, support for Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) 1.0, to consumer and generate web services, Java System Portal Mobile Access for voice access and integration with portal services.
Sun also claimed, yesterday, 175,000 employees are JES, since launch in January, with 250 commercial ISV applications available on the platform.
