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These capabilities are crucial underpinnings that will provide the foundation for Sun's push into distributed grid computing, he said. A core premise of this developing computing model is that servers will automatically come online to provide additional capacity as needed. But that process cannot happen until servers can dynamically discover and replicate new environments.

Ingram said that these and other capabilities inherent in Solaris will provide the foundation that will allow Sun and its allies to counter the vision put forth by Microsoft in its .Net architecture, which ultimately envisions a world where applications automatically discover and integrate with one another using Web services.

In contrast, Sun will use Web services to link loosely coupled applications, while relying on Java to link tightly coupled applications.

"In Microsoft's view of the world, everything is based on XML and loosely coupled applications. We see a need for loosely coupled applications and tightly coupled applications using Java," Ingram said.

Industry analysts said the war over the next generation of distributed computing between Microsoft and Sun is far from over.

Rikki Kirzner, research director at IDC in Mountain View, Calif., said the battle will not be won on the basis of one or two tools. Market penetration, cost-effectiveness of implementation, and ease of use will be the critical customer drivers, she said. "The companies have to make the solutions real," Kirzner said, commenting that vendors need to do more than simply adopt standards such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).

Microsoft, IBM, and Computer Associates are also working on technology to control and manage distributed computing environments to deliver Web services. But Sun may beat its rivals to the punch. Sun's hardware and OS components are stand-alone and proprietary, making the groundwork for development specific and more efficient, said Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at Illuminata, in Nashua, N.H.