Telecommunications giant Telstra has settled on SunOne to form the foundation for its online services infrastructure, while the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) said 26 of its member institutions are currently in negotiations to license the platform.
The carrier's research labs will become Sun iForce Solution Centre certiifed, fortifying a relationship which was sealed last July when the duo agreed to jointly develop service provision applications on the platform. Sun has 50 such centres--which form the vanguard of the company's J2EE development push in competition with Microsoft's .Net platform--across the globe.
Telstra expects to increase efficiency in its current network environment with the Sun alliance. "Basically, we've got about 85 different software elements and different vendors in our online environment. It won't be cut...it won't be a single software supplier but it will be dramatically reduced and that's the essence of the Sun relationship," said Andrew Johnson, Telstra Online Services managing director.
Meanwhile, Sun's campaign to capture the education market has so far been concentrated on the desktop. Late last year, the company announced that it would allow educational institutions to buy its office productivity software, StarOffice, for minimal fee--a move widely seen as a challenge to the dominance of Microsoft Office.
It hopes CAUDIT's decision to implement SunONE will clear a path for both StarOffice and Sun's upcoming desktop operating system project dubbed Mad Hatter.
To the consortium, SunOne represents a cheaper alternative to other solutions.
"The commercial price of many of those tools is quite substantial and will certainly inhibited us from rolling it out to staff and students," said CAUDIT chair Nick Tate. He estimated that up to 500,000 students, academics and researchers could benefit from SunOne.
