June 4, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- This week's most significant Web hosting Industry news all leaned toward the launch of new products and services, with some of the biggest news made by Sun Microsystems, as the technology giant worked to preserve its relevance in the data center.

On Tuesday, it was reported that Sun had released a suite of N1 Grid technologies designed to revolutionize data center economics, helping to simplify the process of deploying and managing enterprise grids and resources for delivering network services. Along with the grid technologies, Sun announced that it had released 16 new reference architectures and solutions designed to provide enterprises with access to "thousands of hours of know-how" related to applications from vendors such as Oracle, SAP and Cognos. Sun says the new offerings demonstrate its leadership in the move to open up grid computing for enterprise applications.

On Wednesday, Sun announced its plans to make source code for the Solaris operating system available under an open source license. The company said an open source version of Solaris is currently under development, though it did not reveal how much of the software would be made open source, or when Sun plans to release the software. Sun has been debating the release of open source Solaris code for months, as some analysts say the rapid development of Linux could make Solaris irrelevant if Sun does not go open source by the end of the year.

Along with the major product news from Sun, several other companies related to the Web hosting business introduced significant new products and services of their own this week.

On Wednesday, domain name registrar RegistryPro announced that it had launched the .pro domain, the first new top-level domain introduced since 2002. The .pro extension is only available to licensed doctors, lawyers and accountants, with professional status verified as part of the registration process. RegistryPro said it will include digital certificates with .pro registration, enhancing the domain's effectiveness in verifying identity and secure communications.

On Thursday, automation software firm SWsoft announced that it had released a beta version of the Plesk 7 control panel for Windows. The company says it expects to release the full version in July. SWsoft says it developed Plesk 7 for Windows in response to feedback from customers. The company found that a large percentage of Windows servers are used by end customers, and created the new Plesk tool to allow those users to manage their windows servers.

Also on Thursday, Web search giant Google announced that it had released the latest version of its Google Search Appliance, an integrated hardware and software device designed to provide a Google-quality search tool for enterprises and Web sites. According to Google, the new version of the Search Appliance has been enhanced to provide enhanced search performance, fresher content and more relevant search results. The company says the device reduces the amount of time required to manage search on intranets and customer-facing Web sites.

And on Friday, it was reported that Web hosting provider Affinity had introduced the CreateIt Site Builder, a Web site building tool available as a downloadable desktop application designed to allow customers to create Web sites without requiring any technical expertise. Affinity developed CreateIt as an extension to Macromedia's Web content management and publishing tool Contribute 2. Sites created using the tool, says Affinity, could be edited using any of the standard site editing tools, including Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Obviously the largest trend in this week's news was the launch of new products and services. But more importantly, many of the products introduced this week marked milestones in the efforts of the companies that brought them out: Affinity's movement away from the browser-based site-builder to a more complete software tool; Swsoft's delivery of Plesk server management to the Windows server set; RegistryPro's delivery of domain-based proof of idenity; and, of course, the intriguing possibility of an open source Solaris.