Sun's Passport-buster is nothing but 'Solaris dressed up'

The products which comprise Sun's bid to challenge Microsoft's Passport offering are not up to the job, according to two leading analysts.

Sun has put together two packages to help organisations authenticate and identify people accessing online services, a move which is in direct competition to Passport.

The company claims its brace of hardware, software and services offerings will give it and other members of the Liberty Alliance - a group established to set standards for web services which Microsoft has so far refrained from joining - a solid platform to take on Passport.

However, web services analyst Christine Axton from Ovum doesn't think Sun's strategy is wise.
She said: "Web services are supposed to be about interoperability but Sun doesn't get it. It feels it needs to have some kind of tie-in to get people to use its software, which is why it's plugging hardware and services now.

"Sun isn't the most advanced company in the software space. The Liberty Alliance and other alliances involve vendors agreeing what to do in a totally open way. Until Sun gets that idea, it's not going to go anywhere in web services."

James Governor, web services analyst at research company Illuminata, said Sun is simply pushing its Solaris servers under the web services banner.

He said: "Hardware is not going to give Sun an advance on Microsoft's Passport. This sounds like a legacy announcement. This is Solaris dressed up."

Simon Holloway, senior consultant at Sun, explained his company's motives behind the hardware and services packages - called the Sun Open Net Environment Platform for Network Identity.

He said: "This is us putting in place things that we think people will find necessary in order to use the web services standards that are due out later this year from the Liberty Alliance."

Sun's offering is made up of its iPlanet Directory Server Software, Sun Fire UltraSPARC III servers, StorEdge D2 storage array and the Solaris 8 operating system.