Sun and Microsoft Make Interoperability Overtures

Published: March 13, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems this week pledged cooperation to ensure their respective products work together. The giants of tech formed the Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus, where Sun's X64 servers and storage products will be tested with Microsoft hardware. Sun also launched a bundle of products for running Exchange Server 2007.

While Sun and Microsoft aren't exactly lovebirds, they've been remarkably amicable to each other since 2004, when they buried the hatchet and agreed not to sue each other any more, for the good of their joint customers.

Now nearly four years into the 10-year agreement, the two companies are celebrating the term du jour, which is, of course, "interoperability." To that end, they've created the new Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center to help customers test and tune Microsoft software on Sun's Intel- and AMD-based servers.

The stated goals of the interoperability center is to optimize Microsoft applications running on the X64 Sun Fire servers and storage, and provide customers with access to the "top architects" at Microsoft and Sun. Along the way, the companies will work on ensuring that their respective virtualization, systems management tools, and identity management offerings are compatible, interoperable, and generally co-habitable.

And as much as it may pain Microsoft, Sun's Java technology will also be placed in the interoperability mug. The companies say they're committing to pursue interoperability between the various flavors of Java--Java EE, Java SE, and JRE--with .NET Framework version 3.

Also on the center's docket will be interoperability between the two companies' Web services technologies, namely Microsoft's Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the various flavors of Java and JAX-WS. Sun refers to this project internally as Project Tango, which has been underway for a couple of years.

Another big focus of the interoperability center will be showcasing Microsoft's new e-mail server, the 64-bit Exchange Server 2007, running on Sun Fire systems and Sun storage. Sun has already done a bit of work in this area, and the results are evident in Sun Infrastructure Solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, a turn-key Exchange environment that Sun unveiled last week. The solution is pretested and will deliver substantial savings in rack space and energy requirements, and total cost of ownership (TCO), according to Sun.

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