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Sun beats out MS for big India contract

By Chris Preimesberger on February 04, 2004 (8:00:00 AM)

Sun Microsystems may be on a roll regarding sales in the Far East. Following the November news that it will supply up to 200 million Java/Linux desktop systems over a period of years to the Republic of China, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based corporation today announced a 10,000-seat sale of its StarOffice 7 software to the United India Insurance Co.

The insurance conglomerate chose StarOffice over -- you guessed it -- re-upping its contract with Microsoft for its Office XP suite.

United India Insurance Co. is one of the four subsidiaries of General Insurance Corp., and has its headquarters in Chennai. It is the second-largest insurer by size of premium and market share of the entire general insurance business transacted throughout India.

United India has countrywide presence with 21,565 employees working in 1,123 offices.

"We selected Sun's StarOffice 7 software because it matches our technical specifications and it is very competitively priced," said S.M. John Victor, assistant general manager, Information Technology, UIIC, Limited Chennai India.

Sun on Wednesday also announced the general availability of StarOffice on Solaris x86, which the company has been giving away free of charge since October. The announcement is significant because it is the first indication Sun has given that it will have its Java Desktop System available for Solaris x86 later this year. StarOffice 7 is the main business application suite included in the JDS.

Today, applications such as Mozilla 1.6, incorporating the Firebird Web browser, Thunderbird e-mail and newsgroup client, Macromedia Flash and now StarOffice 7, are supported on Solaris. Additionally, there are more than 100 desktops and laptops listed on the Solaris x86 hardware compatibility list.

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Is it just me?

Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 05, 2004 01:08 PM

Or does anyone else think ``THIS IS HUGE!''?

I have to wonder how many unlicensed copies of Microsoft products are running in China. I'm certain it was one heck of a lot but it was a bunch of desktops that Microsoft thought it would eventually get properly licensed and paid for. Even if they dropped to the price of Office to US$10 (which would be unheard of, right?) that would amount to US$2B over the lifetime of this deal. The price of MSFT is bound to be affected by this loss of potential sales.

mainstream

Posted by: Enquest on February 05, 2004 02:46 PM

It only mean Linux and GNU are going main stream. The only worry we should have is the fact that the goals of the free software community is getting raped.
The free software community has set on a task to make software freedom for evrybody. Some company take this free software and at non-free software.

Is this a bad thing, or good. Thats still a question. If the ultimate result wil be more freedom then its good. If the end result wil be just a Microsoft non-free replacmet then that wil be bad!

Reasonable business model

Posted by: SarsSmarz on February 05, 2004 10:41 PM

I always think that Sun has its bipolar cycles. The latest is that it is putting Soffice on x86 Solaris. Maybe that's just a fish thrown to those users.

Sun's big deals with China and India don't invalidate the free software model. Sun can throw all the software 'over the wall', and still charge for the implementation and quality assurance. At a few dollars a pop for those billions, it is worth it! And as I said before, the big money is in all those servers to watch over everybody.