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By Kate Hanaghan, 28 August 2001 16:00

NEWS Sun has finally unveiled the first product in its Sun One web services strategy, seven months after it announced plans to tackle Microsoft's .NET strategy head-on. iPlanet - the company jointly owned by Sun and AOL Time Warner - will ship three integration products in September. The three products cover enterprise application integration, B2B integration and message-oriented middleware. But Simon Holloway, product marketing manager for Sun integration services, admitted Sun has been slow off the mark. "Sun could be viewed as following rather than leading. I don't think we're playing catch-up, though - we're formalising the family of products," he said. He partly blames Sun's marketing strategy, which has been dwarfed by Microsoft's .NET effort. Mike Thompson, principal analyst at Butler Group, said Sun isn't alone in its web services quagmire. "I think Sun is being a little bit hard on itself most vendors have done a fairly bad job. They need to stop talking about web services and come up with some case studies to show what the real business benefits are," he said. Thompson added: "iPlanet is becoming the business driver for Sun, which has typically been seen as a core infrastructure provider." However, Eduardo Gonzalez, analyst at Frost and Sullivan, argued that iPlanet itself is a troubled company that recently laid off 500 staff. He said: "Next year it is most likely that iPlanet will become part of Sun I don't think it will renew the venture with AOL."