AUTOMOTIVE

The company said its on-demand computing will cost $1 per microprocessor per hour; its storage offering will cost $1 per gigabyte used per month. The computing and storage offerings will be powered by Sun Grid Centers in Virginia, Texas, New Jersey, Canada and Scotland for the first phase of a worldwide rollout. Those centers are slated to be up and running with some financial and oil and gas companies as customers in the next few months. Sun, which has long talked about grid computing, said recently it would offer computing power and storage on a pay-per-use basis. IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. also offer various on-demand computing services. "Now we're talking about actual deployment," John Loiacono, head of software for Sun, said in an interview. "We're trying to look at the horizon of what's coming next and be there early on." Sun has suffered more than rivals IBM and Dell Inc. since the implosion of the dot-com and telecommunications investment bubbles four years ago. In addition to losing market share to servers that run the freely available Linux operating system, which competes with Sun's Solaris, two of Sun's key customer segments -- telecommunications and financial services -- were hit hard during the downturn. "As the [IT] industry continues to evolve, customers will need to move away from building data centers in a one-off customized model toward a standardized model and eventually to a utility model," said Sun CEO Scott McNealy. Sun also rolled out new software for customers, such as its Sun Compliance and Content Management Solution program, which makes it easier for companies to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Act regulatory requirements. The company also said it would sell its Java Enterprise System -- a collection of IT management software -- as suites, rather than as a bundle of the offerings, as it has until now. The new suites are aimed at the midmarket and include identity management, system availability, Web infrastructure and other technologies. Sun plans to sell them by subscription for $50 per employee, per year.