At a press conference Monday, the software maker is expected to show off a gaggle of partners, spanning software vendors, Web integrators and application service providers. Among the Internet services companies expected to show their support: AnswerThink, Center 7, iXL, Loudcloud, MarchFirst and Proxicom.
IPlanet--which is 50 percent owned by Sun--also is pushing Sun hardware competitors Hewlett Packard and IBM to publicly back its e-commerce software at Monday's event. Even though iPlanet's wares are fully geared to run on HP and IBM hardware, a source at HP says a public endorsement isn't going to happen.
The event is a little disguised and much needed push to generate buzz around iPlanet's e-commerce offerings. With vendors like BroadVision and Vignette snapping up business-to-consumer e-commerce momentum, and heavyweights Ariba and Commerce One gobbling up the business-to-business segment, iPlanet has made few waves of late.
"We expected them to be a formidable competitor, but that hasn't happened yet," says David Andrews, a product marketing executive with BroadVision.
Part of iPlanet's battle is aiming its high-end wares at the mainstream corporate market. In the past, at least one Web integrator has shied away from the suite of products, saying they weren't applicable outside the largest few dozen corporations.
But iPlanet believes its high-end image could pay dividends as the e-commerce market matures. After all, e-biz deployments will likely get only more ambitious. "The platform that will emerge as the champion of the decade ... [requires] massive scalability," iPlanet president Mark Tolliver states in a preliminary press release viewed by Sm@rt Partner. "The iPlanet [platform] is today's most robust solution."
IPlanet, however, faces an even tougher challenge: Operating under the awkward blueprints bestowed it by parents Sun, Netscape and AOL.
When America Online closed its purchase of Netscape in early 1999, it had no interest in claiming its software products beyond the Web browser. But the Internet mammoth couldn't sell Netscape's software arm--spanning Web and application servers to e-commerce products--outright to Sun, for tax reasons. Instead, AOL spun off the division and sold half of the unit to Sun.
While complete ownership of iPlanet is expected to be transferred to Sun as early as next year, the software maker still answers to two parents for decisions as simple as hiring and promoting employees, which creates a bureaucratic tangle.
Nevertheless, iPlanet execs insist they have been granted complete autonomy to run their business as they see fit, even if it means warming up to some of Sun's fiercest competitors. After all, such cross-platform support, coupled with a commitment to standards like J2EE, XML and LDAP, can only bolster its roster of partners and strengthen iPlanet's message in the e-commerce arena.
