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By Sarah Left, 22 May 2000 00:30

NEWS The president of iPlanet has admitted that his company - formerly the Sun/Netscape Alliance - is still fighting for brand recognition one year after its launch. Mark Tolliver, iPlanet's president, said: "The name hasn't come into its own. Brands are so hard, it takes years. We're really about six months into it, because for the first six months we were the Sun/Netscape Alliance. But that's like having an organisational breakdown chart as your brand." The Sun and AOL subsidiary launched in March 1999 as an ecommerce platform group, after the two companies carved up Netscape. AOL took the browser and Sun adopted the company's ecommerce technologies, with the latter division being rebranded as iPlanet. Looking to the future, Tolliver's vision for the company is product-based, and he says a market has opened up for Web platform products as online marketplace rivals Ariba and Commerce One become sidelined with services. He said: "There is an opportunity for somebody to create and dominate the Web-enabled platform space. I would like to be recognised in this space as Oracle is recognised in databases." Tolliver insisted that there are no plans to float iPlanet as a discrete company. He said: "It's too close to Sun's core business to spin off." Analysts agreed that Tolliver has a tough job ahead of him. Dale Vile, senior analyst at Bloor Research, said: "He's starting from a zero base of awareness, so unless he uses the Sun name, he'll find it hard. They do have lots of cash, but relying on Sun won't give him the pure brand he's after." Gary Barnett, analyst for Ovum, said BEA, IBM and Microsoft are powerful incumbents in this space, and Sun's strong history in building hardware will not help iPlanet in the middleware market. He said: "I hope that Tolliver does not underestimate the enormous challenge that they face. I certainly would not be excluding services, especially when they inherited some great applications from Netscape."