McNealy Has Veritas, BEA In His Sights

"The definition of middleware is software that should have been bundled for free last year," said McNealy in a roundtable setting with a group of editors at Comdex.

"I have people taking my file system out and putting Veritas in," said McNealy. "What is up with that? I was with the Lucent folks and I said, 'Would you even allow a customer to take your file system out of your telephone switch and put a third-party vendor in, or stick an EMC disk drive into the memory drive train of your environment or add in somebody else's application server on top?"

McNealy said Sun is basically taking the same tack as Microsoft in building more software tightly integrated into the operating system. "The differences are we're moving it to the systems platform so you don't have to go out and integrate it [with Dell or integrate it [with IBM, or whatever, and get those screwy incompatibilities when you have 'general' and 'motors' instead of General Motors."

Unlike the Wintel approach, McNealy said, Sun's strategy is "integratable and not welded shut, so you can pull our app server out and put somebody else's in. You can pull our directory out. You can pull out any of the key Lego blocks. In fact, you can even pull our Solaris kernel out and put Linux in there or vice versa."

McNealy said Sun is shooting to deliver the fully integrated SunONE software stack by the end of June. "Do I think they'll get it done by then--fully certified, tested and where I think it is rock solid?" McNealy said. "I am not holding my breath."

McNealy said he has a team of about 30 engineers working on the integrated software stack. He said that his vision for the SunONE integrated stack is to have it boot up on a Sun system just as Microsoft's many different pieces of software integrated with its OS boot up on Windows.

McNealy said Sun has more software than solution providers or customers realize. "If I were to list all of the software applications and features and capabilities we have inside this company, it would blow you away," he said. "I think somebody ought to do that research and present it. I have way more software available than I do hardware available in this company."