Sun Microsystems unveiled Tuesday the Sun One Platform for Network Identity, packages of hardware, software, and services aimed at a major network problem--managing the authentications of thousands of employees, customers, and business partners. Companies' often-legitimate need to identify visitors to sell services or products means customers must remember a multitude of IDs and passwords, leading to frustration and lost sales. "Online identity is a nightmare, and anyone who is a major user of the Internet is aware of that," Hurwitz Group analyst Pete Lindstrom says. "There's no continuity or consistency."

The new offering comes in an enterprise edition for behind-the-firewall intranets and an Internet edition for managing extranet users. Both packages include the iPlanet Directory Server Access Management Edition, the iPlanet Web Server, the Solaris operating system, Sun Fire 280R Servers, the Sun StorEdge D2 Array, and 10 days of consulting services. The major differences are in price and the number of users each package can handle. The enterprise edition is priced at $149,995 and can handle up to 10,000 online identities; the Internet edition is $999,995 for up to 250,000 identities.

Sun's new packages provide a single sign-on for a company's extranet but don't solve the Internetwide problem. However, during a teleconference announcing the products, Sun chief strategist Jonathan Schwartz said the platforms would support interoperability specifications due to be released midyear by the Liberty Alliance. The group, which includes Sun, AOL Time Warner, Visa International, and dozens of other companies, is developing standards for linking Web sites, so passwords and user IDs can follow visitors as they click across the Internet. The alliance is competing with a similar service from Microsoft called Passport. Lindstrom said Sun was "walking the talk" in announcing support for alliance specifications, but Amy Wohl, president of consulting firm Wohl Associates, says the announcement was premature: "How will I know that what I'm doing here will follow what's in the Liberty specifications?

Analysts did not find the million-dollar price tag unusually high for the package's Internet edition, given the number of users supported. The costs could be justified for companies that integrate the identity server, for example, to customer-relationship management software to target more products and services to customers. "All of a sudden you end up with new business opportunities," Lindstrom says. However, analysts agreed that the cost of services could run three or four times the initial cost of the hardware and software, depending on the complexity of integration to back-office and legacy applications.