Home Banking: Sun Microsystems Seeks To Fill Internet Potholes

Sun Microsystems is planning a series of announcements today aimed at spurring electronic commerce for banks and other businesses.

The announcements represent the latest attempt by the Mountain View, Calif., company, best known for its powerful computer workstations, to improve accessibility to information-based services on public computer networks and to ensure transaction security.

The new products are designed to smooth the path for business onto the Internet and "make electronic commerce a reality," Sun Microsystems officials told the American Banker.

Sun has long played a key role in Internet activity. The company's emphasis in the 1980s on science and engineering dovetailed with the prominence of those types of systems in the Internet, which ties together thousands of computer networks around the world for academic, government, and commercial purposes.

More than half of Internet server-computers are from Sun.

The company's more recent success in selling to financial institutions, and the use of its computers in many of the electronic commerce systems that have recently come on the market, puts it in a position to profit from the growth of commercial activity on the portion of Internet known as the World Wide Web.

"We are reaching the point where the format is attractive and the infrastructure is in place to facilitate commerce," said Carl Stolle, director of server product marketing for Sun Microsystems Computer Co. "Sun wants to be the first place businesses go to get established on the Internet."

"Sun wants to be to the Internet what Levi Strauss was to the gold rush," said Mr. Stolle, referring to the jeans maker who clothed the California miners. "Lots of businesses see gold in the Internet; Sun wants to help them pan."

Acknowledging that current configurations on the Internet make selling and payment processing unwieldy, Sun set out to create simpler means of access while addressing the security issues that may deter some businesses from full-scale electronic commerce.

The company's introductions include an eye-catching browsing system for the World Wide Web called HotJava, a secure transaction framework called SunScreen, and a public key encryption method called Skip - Simple Key Management for Internet Protocol.

Adding to its "complete server solution for the Internet" called Netra, Sun will also be selling several tools, including Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator program, to help companies create home pages and buy and sell products and services on the Internet.

"We see Netra as a good solution for retail banks wanting their own access to the Internet, without having to deal with the complexity of buying their own Unix system with its extensive documentation and training requirements," Mr. Stolle said.

Based on a Sun programming language called Java, HotJava is billed as "the world's first dynamic Web browser." It can appear to the user more like a multimedia CD-ROM program than the more typical static browsing tool.

Michelle Arden, director of operations and business development in Sun's Internet Commerce Group, said HotJava has been in use for a month and has gotten a "tremendous response" from companies seeking better ways to portray themselves and their products to the millions of Internet computer subscribers.

The system is suited for marketing and advertising in general, and for interactive applications, including financial statements and portfolio management, distance learning, scientific experimentation, and games, she said.

Ms. Arden said she expects banks to be interested in using HotJava, but most of the early financial industry interest has come from brokers.

While perhaps two to three dozen commercial banks have established sites on the Internet, Fidelity Investments and other mutual fund and securities firms have been especially aggressive in exploring its commercial potential.

And while Sun is increasingly selling its systems to commercial banks for a wide range of applications, including retail automation, the company is a dominant supplier of high-powered trading workstations at Wall Street firms.

Union Bank of Switzerland is an early user of the SunScreen security product, which Ms. Arden said is designed for the most demanding needs of complex commercial networks.

The bank's UBS Network Services unit in Zurich was "very pleased" with test results, said executive Giorgio Scherl. "Solstice SunScreen offers the kind of security required to protect communication among multiple bank sites."

He also spoke favorably of the Skip key management system and said it could be widely used in banking, if standardized. Sun has, indeed, proposed Skip as a standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force.

"We are aggressively promoting standards in this area because it will be important long-term for interoperability of payment schemes and billing systems," Ms. Arden said.

Mr. Stolle described Sun's security efforts as a "core competency for Internet commerce," and Ms. Arden said the necessary security- and privacy- assuring technologies are just beginning to come together.

SunScreen, she said, represents an advance on Sun's popular Solstice Firewall-1 access control system, including encryption and authentication capability that allows for a "Virtual Secure Private Network" on public lines.

SunScreen protection at two ends of a communication allows for full data encryption that is "transparent to the user" and "a good framework for metering and billing" of computer services, Ms. Arden said.

She said financial institutions will commonly install high-level security internally, as Union of Switzerland did, before using it with customers.

"The first stage of many of these technologies is business to business. That's where most of the investments are today," she said.

"The next stage will be connecting to the consumer. Now that the tools are there, there is a reality behind all the Internet hype for business applications."

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