InformationWeek

September 14, 1998

Compaq, Sun Tighten Ties Between Unix And NT

Microsoft, Compaq team up; Sun to strengthen Solaris

By Mary Hayes and Martin J. Garvey

ompaq and Sun Microsystems are putting plans in place to help companies cope with the challenges of supporting mixed computing environments. Both vendors last week launched initiatives to provide tighter integration between their Unix operating systems and Windows NT. But they're tackling the job in different ways. Compaq and Microsoft are teaming to deliver solutions that promote cooperation between Digital Unix and NT systems. But Sun, which has built a business selling alternatives to Wintel computers, is instead bringing Windows and NT capabilities to the Solaris platform.

The road map outlined by Compaq commits the vendor to building support for Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) into Digital Unix. That should improve integration between the programming models of that operating system and NT, so that users can more easily develop cross-platform applications. Engineers from Compaq and Microsoft will also work together to improve interoperability in other areas, including security, transaction processing, and data management.

Compaq and Microsoft haven't disclosed a time frame for delivering these capabilities, but customers are eager to see the results of their efforts. "The two operating systems don't play all that well together right now," says Peter Flack, managing director of technology for the Best Western International Inc. hotel chain. Best Western uses Digital Unix on the back end to run a reservation system, and NT as the interface for approximately 12,000 reservation agents. Flack says the company now has to do most of its operations and administration separately on the two platforms, so support gets expensive. As Best Western moves toward building a Web-based reservation system, support for COM will be crucial. "It would make life easier for development, and for flowing information between the two sys- tems," he says.

John Rose, senior VP and group general manager at Compaq, says the deal will boost the viability of Digital Unix in such cases. "I've talked to hundreds of CIOs with mixed environments, and they're looking for lower cost of operations," says Rose. "I don't think any other Unix vendor has driven this level of interoperability with Microsoft."

Sun, for example, is building part of its integration strategy on AT&T's Advanced Server for Unix technology. Early next year, Sun will roll out NT 4.0 administrative services running on top of Solaris. Sun hopes this will convince NT users to reduce the number of their NT servers, because Solaris is more mature and can run more services and applications on one server.

But one potential problem some Sun customers fear is that Microsoft may cut off AT&T from access to NT 5.0 because of ongoing litigation between the two companies. "I want to know how collaborative Microsoft and Sun will be" at that point, says Sanjeev Datta, VP of the Internet technology group for Fidelity Investments in Smithfield, R.I.

Masood Jabbar, president of Sun computer systems, says he is confident the company will be able to offer Solaris users full access to NT 5.0 services and beyond, even if it has to partner with a different company to deliver the technology.

Sun has other NT integration plans: All its storage systems will be compatible with NT servers, so Sun customers can reduce the number of storage systems required to support a mixed NT-Solaris environment. Sun will also sell the SunPCi co-processor card, which plugs into Sun Ultra workstations to let users run Windows productivity software.

Analyst Wayne Kernochan of Aberdeen Group says that for now, the most important thing is that NT integration is happening in force. He also expects that Solaris-NT 4.0 integration will improve even more when Sun provides NT application server capabilities next year.