
The new JES is the first major release since Sun dropped licensing fees for its middleware and made them available on a subscription basis bundled with support at US$100 per employee per year for the basic application.
The basic offering includes application, Web and portal servers, to which users can add additional componentised modules.
The Java Composite Application Platform Suite, for instance, offers middleware applications to build an infrastructure for service oriented architectures. Another module adds identity services.
Sun claims 1.3 million customers for its software suite.