This morning I listened to a recording of Greg Papadopoulos’ comments about the

Sun/Microsoft interoperability announcement
last Friday. I was impressed with three items in particular:

1. The customer is the primary driver for this relationship. Customer’s are demanding that the two main platforms in which they have sunk large investments (JES and .net) must interoperate.

2. Service oriented architectures – such as the

EDS Agile Enterprise
where Sun is the server vendor – require platform interoperabilty to succeed.

3. The concept of “Identity Agreements” between services enables interoperation.

I also liked Greg’s parting statement “this is not loving Microsoft. We’re going to compete like crazy. I think we have, by far, the best … it’s the open solution. It is really the way that the customers ought to go do their development. But in as much as the Microsoft world is going to exist, and continue to be important parts of our customers’ base, then we will have the superior product for interoperating with it.”

Sun’s Identity Management Products will be at the forefront of making this a reality.

Identity