Sun Microsystems Inc. officially entered the enterprise service bus (ESB) market today, rolling out its first upgrade of the former SeeBeyond Inc. messaging middleware and tying it together with Sun's portal, application server, Web server and development studio offerings as part of a single platform.
The platform, called the Composite Application Platform, will be available at the end of March for a free download with a $100 per employee per year subscription price for those companies that wish to add services and support. SeeBeyond, purchased by Sun last June, had it's roots as an enterprise application integration vendor, but Sun believes the middleware has evolved to embody the loosely coupled ethos of service oriented architecture.