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Sun, AOL detail alliance
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March 30, 1999: 12:38 p.m. ET
Venture to market e-commerce software to corporate users
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - America Online and Sun Microsystems said Tuesday the alliance they announced last year plans to introduce joint e-commerce software products by early next year.
The new software products are meant to provide companies with a secure way to do business on the Internet. AOL, the world's biggest online service provider, and Sun, the No. 7 computer maker, also will support products currently offered by Sun (SUNW) and Netscape, which AOL (AOL) bought this month for $10.2 billion, officials said.
The venture, called the Sun-Netscape Alliance, will field 500 sales people to market offerings from both companies that will run on Sun's Solaris operating system, Linux, Microsoft's Windows NT, and on servers running IBM (IBM) and Hewlett Packard (HWP) versions of Unix.
The new venture will continue to market overlapping products from Sun and Netscape in 1999 and combine the products in early 2000. The first joint products are due by March 2000.
Under the alliance, announced when AOL agreed to buy Netscape last November, Sun has said it guaranteed AOL revenue of $975 million from sales of Netscape products over three years and agreed to pay about $308 million in marketing and licensing fees.
Sun specializes in servers used to link personal computers into networks, workstations used by engineers and other high-power machines.
AOL, which completed its purchase of Netscape March 17, said last week it would cut 1,000 jobs, or 8 percent, of the companies' combined work force.
AOL stock jumped 15-9/16 to 147-15/16 on the New York Stock Exchange while Sun added 1-31/32 to 126-15/32 on Nasdaq. 
-- from staff and wire reports
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