Sun the hardware company gets serious with software

But nevertheless it's keen to stress that it remains very much a hardware company.

Core to ONE is the Sun ONE Webtop, which is based on Sun's StarOffice suite. It provides users with an open source environment in which to develop applications - unlike its nearest rival.

The company has also picked a pricing model for the ONE Webtop which it hopes will encourage developers to work with the desktop environment.

Nancy Lee, product line manager for Sun ONE at Sun Microsystems in the UK, said: "We let them choose to have it priced as a bundle into the application or as a subscription model. This is a pretty new technology and we want developers to innovate with it and encourage broader adoption."

When Sun first announced its ONE strategy last month, many industry observers dismissed it as a repackaging of existing Sun software under the guise of e-services.

But Mat Hanrahan, analyst at Bloor Research, claimed this was an unfair assumption and urged users not to underestimate Sun's intentions to offer e-services.

He told silicon.com: "There is money to be made out of software services and Sun now has to move into this space. Its iPlanet offering with Netscape is getting really good reports - these people are not wet behind the ears, they know what they are doing. Sun also has excellent developer links with AOL who are already doing what Microsoft is trying to do with HailStorm."

But Sun itself was keen to reassert its identity as primarily a hardware company, playing down the view that ONE is part of a wider vision to take on Microsoft. In fact, it's just another way to sell servers.

Sun ONE's Lee said: "Hardware is more profitable but software is a way to improve our server sales. In the past few years we've been acquiring different software pieces as we see it as a service."

She denied the company had any ambitions to be a software vendor.

"Our revenues revolve mainly around hardware and these smart web services will add to the sales of the server as more of them are needed to support it."