No Sun Support For Intel

Some Sun solution providers, however, said they had expected the move and that it should not greatly affect the enterprise market.

"I don't think Sun on Intel is in huge demand in the enterprise," said Ed Gogol, director of Unix technologies at Solarcom Partner Services, a full-

service solution provider in Norcross, Ga.

Enabling Unix-based servers to communicate with Intel-based systems is all part of a solution provider's consulting and design work, said Steve Israel, executive vice president of AMC, a New York-based solution provider.

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"Solaris might not talk directly with the systems, but that's where we come in," Israel said. "We're hired to make different systems communicate."

Solaris 9, which is expected to ship by June, has been optimized for systems running Sun's 64-bit UltraSPARC III chip, such as Sun Starfire 15K, as well as for Oracle's middleware and Linux applications, said Graham Lovell, director of Solaris marketing at Sun.

To appease frustrated Intel developers, the company plans to ship an update of Solaris 8. Lovell declined to comment on the enhanced Solaris 8 for the Intel 32-bit platform, slated for availability later this quarter, but said it won't run on the 64-bit Itanium chip. A version of Solaris 9 for Intel also is not out of the question, he added.

Sun released the early access developer's version of Solaris 9 in October. The operating system also integrates Sun's iPlanet directory server, Linux APIs, support for Sun's ONE Web services platform, and enhanced security and management features.