The iBone may have made the telco industry "cool" in the author's local winebar, but the reality of the market is a million miles away. Sun is, as usual nowadays, years behind the market. Blackberry, with a complete stack including a range of its own secure devices, has been punting application tie-ins via BES with companies like SAP, Siebel, Salesforce.con and Onyx for years, yet there has been little interest from the market for the simple reason that companies are not keen on having their confidential data out there in the field where it is at risk of being stolen or accidentally lost, with subsequent legal implications. And that's with the tried-and-trusted security of BES, the established relationship with just about every telco on the planet, and without the limitations of the iBone (no remote wipe, no encryption), a better solution than Sun has cobbled together. This is shown clearly by the fact that Sun is releasing their "solution" for "free", as they know how far behind the game they are.

Matt Bryant suggests, "a better solution than Sun has cobbled together. This is shown clearly by the fact that Sun is releasing their 'solution' for 'free', as they know how far behind the game they are."

I wonder if this individual had considered that SUN had been an Open System vendor (building around freely available standards & offering freely available specifications to standards) from it's founding days and has been open-sourcing everything in recent history: from CPU (highest throughput single socket and dual socket performance) to Firmware (leveraged by alternative vendors) to OS (Solaris considered an excellent platform by the industry) to virtualization (Xen code shipped by multiple vendors and now by SUN) to desktop environment (from their days when they moved from Sunview to X Windows) to Middleware (JAVA is used as the basis for multiple vendor applications and middleware layers) to Applications (OpenOffice is leveraged by the millions of users)?

Considering this company has always been an Open Systems Vendor, from their very first days - any comment suggesting that they are releasing a product for "free" because of some unspecified "problem" demonstrates a poor understanding of the company, it's history, and the continual demonstration of their committment to Open Systems.

Such a rhetorical conclusion is not worth it's weight in virtual ink, casting any statement offered earlier in the light of most likely being poorly reasoned.

Don't put any effort toward Matt. Your conclusion that Matt's statement is "poorly reasoned" misses the fact that Matt does not use reason. Matt uses bias. Bias against Sun and any other solution that Matt does not understand.

Matt Bryant suggests, "without the limitations of the iBone (no remote wipe, no encryption)"

You spelled iPhone incorrectly.

You are also incorrect concerning Apple including Remote Wipe in their iPhone.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/

"Features include: ... Remote wipe"

As a side note about encryption - Apple has included encryption capabilities

http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/integration.html

"Built into every iPhone is a robust VPN client that supports Cisco IPSec, L2TP over IPSec, and PPTP and is intuitive to configure."

It seems the supporting details you posted are faulty.