Microsoft, Sun to Announce Expanded Agreement

This afternoon Eastern time, two representatives from Sun Microsystems and Microsoft will be holding a joint press conference, to discuss what is only being described, for now, as "an expanded agreement between the two companies."

Our best clue as to the nature of the agreement concerns the two people on the conference: Representing Sun is John Fowler, its recently promoted Executive Vice President for the Network Systems Group. For a company that makes networks, systems, and software, if you're a newcomer to Sun, you might wonder what "network systems" actually is. The group was created as part of a 2004 restructuring whose objective was to clearly segment the company's business interests.

Sun describes this group with the following language: "This new division, headed by John Fowler, executive vice president, is tasked with driving innovation and development for Sun's volume systems and workstations, and bringing enterprise-class experience to the commodity computing/x86 space." So it's a hardware-oriented group, despite the fact that Fowler rose to prominence at Sun as its CTO for software. His background is based in Java, though his purview today includes Sun Fire servers and Sun Java workstations.

Representing Microsoft will be Andrew Lees, its corporate VP for server and tools marketing. Lees' principal areas of expertise are server management tools, such as Microsoft's Systems Center line, and virtualization tools.

This narrows down the likely candidates for subject matter considerably, increasing the likelihood that the two companies will announce a kind of joint protocol licensing. This way, Microsoft's server tools would be able to manage heterogeneous networks using Sun's protocols, and Sun would in turn receive access to Microsoft's network protocols.

Doubling the chances for that as the subject matter is the fact that the European Court of First Instance decision on Microsoft's conduct comes Monday, and its handling of protocol licensing is a key element in the judges' final decision.