Sun Microsystems is banding together with more than 50 other companies in an attempt to provide quality of service guarantees for network service customers.

The program, which will be known as SunTone, will provide customers with assurance that the service providers they use are both reliable and scaleable.

"SunTone is a certification program for service providers, so that customers who are signing up to either an application service provider or an Internet service provider or any kind of service provider function, it basically gives them a quality of service comfort level," says Paul Giroux, director of systems engineering at Markham, Ont.-based Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc. "They will know that if they sign up to a SunTone certified partner or service provider that these people have met the stringent requirements of, basically, continuous Web tone or SunTone, as it were, for services rendered over the Internet."

So what will SunTone certification guarantee the customer — 99.999 per cent availability? "It goes way beyond 99.999 per cent," says Giroux. "It's more than just about availability of hardware or software. It takes into account things like architectural scaleability. It takes into account scaleability for the customer, so that they know that if they're SunTone-certified they can scale up their applications to handle any kind of load for the foreseeable future.

Other companies, he says, will provide service provider certification and focus on certain equipment or service level like 99.999 per cent. "Well, 99.999 per cent is not good enough anymore," says Giroux. "Certainly in the service provider marketplace. When these large service providers go down, they make the Wall Street Journal."

Yael Zheng is group manager of marketing in Sun's network service division. She says she feels SunTone will help set a standard for the industry in general.

"Our ultimate goal is to help improve the quality of service in the industry so that we can push for the Web tone to be equal to or exceed the reliability of dial tone," she says. "So it's really a branding program for the companies who would actually go through the certification, who would take measures to certify in terms of their network infrastructure, their operational practices, how reliable it is, how secure it is, how scaleable it is."

Giroux agrees with the dial tone analogy.

"If you think about dial tone, you never picked up a phone and expected not to get a dial tone," he said. "In the SunTone world, what we're saying is that if you ever go to an ISP that is SunTone-certified, you would expect to get service every time you pick up, every time you touch them. And that's really the whole concept. It's beyond hardware. It's also about things like change management and how your architecture is put together and how scaleable it is."

The program is mostly self-funding with applicants for certification responsible for their own on-site auditing fees. "The only cost that there might be is that it's been requested by the member companies that there be an on-site audit after (potential SunTone service providers) complete the self-evaluation. Sun will send someone out to the customer site to do an audit based on the evaluation they have done. So what it costs will be comparable to that particular site, based on the labour and the time spent on the site," says Zheng. "As for the whole program, this is a corporate-wide effort. Sun is very committed to this, so the funding will come from Sun, (and) also from the member companies who will be involved with us in doing co-marketing and co-advertising."

Certification details are still to be worked out. Sun executives say they hope to have the specs for version 1.0 out by January. "Anyone can apply to be SunTone certified," says Giroux, "There's a whole process that they'd have to go through . . . We're still working the details on the final spec, version 1.0 as it were, and we're also putting together the application. The application working group is working on the application side."

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