APPLICATIONS

ORACLEWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO -- From OracleWorld 2002 in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Oracle Corp. heralded two decades of joint innovation and deepened their commitment to deliver high value, reliability and enterprise efficiency to the more than 70,000 Sun and Oracle customers around the world. Upheld by a shared commitment to open, standards-based computing, the Oracle and Sun alliance is recognized for its ability to deliver optimal performance, innovation and value to the customer through joint engineering and marketing programs. As evidence of the effectiveness and value of their vision and solidarity, the two companies detailed three joint customer programs -- Infrastructure Consolidation, Joint Support Services, and Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade -- and highlighted their latest customer wins, including University of Northern Iowa, Virgin Atlantic Airways and Edmonton Public Schools (EPS). "Our long-standing relationship has been successful as a result of Oracle and Sun's shared vision and strong commitment to offer customers high value and complete solutions," said Doug Kennedy, vice president, Platform Alliances, System Platforms Division, Oracle Corporation. "We've innovated and refined solutions around the entire Oracle product stack, from Oracle(R) E-Business Suite to Oracle9i Real Application Clusters on Sun, delivering customers reliable solutions at a low total cost of ownership." DELIVERING VALUE TO THE CUSTOMER The University of Northern Iowa Recently, the University of Northern Iowa replaced its financial information system, human resources and payroll. "We chose Sun for the platform and Oracle for the software," said Dennis Lindner, University of Northern Iowa Information Systems Director. "We wanted one integrated application and one common platform and chose Sun servers and storage running Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i as the foundation for the crucial first phase." Lindner continued, "It was very important that we choose software and platform from leading vendors because we are looking at a long-term solution and we want to be certain it's a long-term relationship." Virgin Atlantic Airways "We migrated all 90 Oracle-based databases from IBM Sequent systems to Sun Fire (TM) 6800 servers, and in the process consolidated from nine servers to two," according to Neil Perry, IT systems operations manager, Virgin Atlantic Airways. "Our market research confirmed that Sun was right for us, and since Oracle is already so critical to us, Sun's strong relationship with Oracle is vitally important." Edmonton Public Schools From Brenda Boychuk, senior data base administrator, Edmonton Public Schools (EPS), "We chose Sun platforms and Oracle databases for our all high-end administrative computing needs. Compared with the previous mainframe-based applications, the Sun and Oracle solutions are delivering up to 20 percent higher user productivity and 75 percent shorter month-end processing." Boychuk continued, "A lot of our success is due to the excellent synergy between Sun and Oracle, one of the reasons why we've standardized on them for all our high-end administrative computing needs." JOINT INITIATIVES Over the past year, Sun and Oracle have increased their cooperative efforts to include the following programs: -- Infrastructure Consolidation The "Consolidate and Save" program, a component of the Infrastructure Consolidation Initiative, provides joint migration and consolidation services, and trade-in offerings, and allows Sun and Oracle to help customers achieve higher performance, overall availability, and investment protection. The competitive trade in offers from Sun and Oracle include two components. Oracle's Safe Switch program, effective until the end of this month, offers 100 percent trade-in credit on net database licenses from competing vendors. Sun's Upgrade Allowance program provides up to 30 percent off the purchase of a new Sun server when trading in older Sun or non-Sun servers. A key component of the Infrastructure Consolidation Initiative is the engineering collaboration around Oracle9i Real Application Clusters on the SunPlex platform. Customers gain higher levels of availability, scalability and system performance by leveraging Oracle9i Real Application Clusters into a SunPlex environment -- delivering one of the most advanced, clustered infrastructures in the industry. -- Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade - Sun and Oracle are working together to educate customers on the financial benefits of upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite customers to 11i. At the same time, customers can assess their hardware infrastructure to ensure long term costs are low while opportunities to expand their business are high. -- Joint Support Services - Oracle and Sun have a history of collaboration and cooperative support of our joint customers. In addition to a technical support agreement that enables our support teams to work together to resolve customer issues, Oracle and Sun took this concept one step further by establishing a joint support center to enable faster resolution of customer support issues. The net result has been a dramatic improvement in problem resolution time and overall customer satisfaction. In order to further improve and differentiate Oracle and Sun joint support offerings, the companies will evolve from a simply reactive to a more proactive model. This will enable Oracle and Sun to deliver the highest levels of reliability, availability and serviceability to our joint customer base. MORE JOINT ACTIVITIES -- Joint Storage Solutions To help Oracle data center customers reliably consolidate their environments, Sun is now offering new Data Base Validator software for the Sun StorEdge(TM) 9900 series. Certified under Oracle's Hardware Assisted Resilient Data (H.A.R.D.) initiative, DB Validator software will help prevent data corruptions from occurring. The new Oracle Certification Environment (OCE) functional certification of the Sun StorEdge(TM) Performance Suite software will help Oracle9i Database customers improve system performance and scalability. -- Oracle Collaboration Suite on Sun Roughly one-half the cost, Oracle Collaboration Suite running on the Solaris(TM) platform is a superior choice to the current high-cost, unstable alternative, Microsoft Exchange. The combined Oracle/Sun solution can scale to more than 10,000 concurrent users without the need to add more servers, compared with Microsoft installations. "Anchored by two decades of intense collaboration and innovation, our companies practically share the same DNA, characterized by a steadfast commitment to open, standards-based, reliable, scalable and secure technology," said Stuart Wells, senior vice president, Sun Microsystems Market Development Organization. "As the number one UNIX platform provider on the planet, and the most consistent platform for Oracle customers, we believe our joint success and cooperation will continue to serve an even greater purpose for the customer; reliability, dependability, faster time-to-market and peace-of-mind."