Sun sets up autonomous Forté, completes its Java portfolio

1999-10-25

In a similar fashion to IBM with Tivoli and Lotus, SUN is to give Forté a semi-autonomous status. The Forté organisational structure will report into the head of software at SUN, however there will be no moves to change the internal organisation of the division, beyond establishing the communications channels to enable Forté to work with other parts of SUN’s organisation.

This is clearly good news. Forté is in the right place at the right time with the right products, reasons why the company was so attractive to SUN in the first place. Forté recognised that its traditional market, of bespoke enterprise application development tools, was insufficient to guarantee the company’s future success. With Fusion, it moved into the Enterprise Application Integration space; more recently, with SynerJ, it released tools to support the Java 2 Enterprise Environment or J2EE. Forté’s original vision, of producing scalable, reliable platforms for enterprise development, has been retained and enhanced to meet today’s demands. Now, it seems, the organisation will be able to retain this strategy as it moves forward into the future.

Sun Microsystems is a canny company. Still recognised primarily for its hardware, it has quietly been building up a software portfolio based around the unexpected success of Java as an enterprise language. This fortune is as much down to IBM as anyone, nonetheless Sun have been putting in place the elements it needs to benefit directly from Java. Since its acquisition of NetDynamics, through its developing relationship with AOL/Netscape to the more recent purchases of Forté and NetBeans, Sun have assembled the portfolio of products it needs to start generating real revenue from the Java language. Services will also play a big part, but these would not be possible without the comprehensive set of products that Sun have now at their disposition.

(First published 25 October 1999)