DEFENSE

PALO ALTO, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) and the University of Alberta, Canada, today announced the selection of the university as the first-ever Sun Center of Excellence for E-Learning. The University of Alberta offers the world's largest university e-learning site with more than 100,000 enrollments in WebCT courses, one of the leading course management system providers. As a Sun Center of Excellence, the University of Alberta will serve as a model to the education community in examining how to configure and operate a scalable Sun system-based WebCT environment with the security, performance, reliability and availability required for mission critical systems. Educational institutions across the world will benefit from this COE by using the best practices, implementation guides and sizing and scalability information generated by the center. "Sun chose the University of Alberta to be the Center of Excellence for E-Learning because of its leadership in transforming the education environment today," said Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research for Sun Microsystems. "Bringing academia to students anywhere, anytime, over any device reflects Sun's vision for education and our commitment to serving as a partner to the education community." "Being chosen as a Sun Center of Excellence is an important recognition of the university's leadership in e-learning," said University of Alberta Vice President (Academic) and Provost Dr. Doug Owram. "Working with Sun, we look forward to emphasizing how e-learning is changing the face of traditional education and helping other universities around the world implement successful Web-based learning programs." "Sun really came through for us by providing the essential hardware to build the scalability we needed. In so doing they demonstrated an empathy for what we are trying to achieve in pushing the boundaries of education as well as being a first rate provider of e-learning systems," said Michael Byrne, director of computing and networked services at the University of Alberta. "The Center of Excellence represents a natural step in the evolution of our relationship with vendors that have proven their ability to deliver quality and performance consistently for our mission critical applications." "We have a tremendous partnership with the University of Alberta, which was an early leader in e-learning with a real commitment to excellence," said Carol Vallone, CEO of WebCT. "The university began with a significant number of courses and then grew that offering substantially over the last two years. As more institutions around the world scale their e-learning campus-wide, they will turn to model programs like the University of Alberta and its Center of Excellence as a resource." The University of Alberta launched its distributed learning program in September 1998 with 100 courses, a number that increased to more than 1,000 by January 2000. Sun servers running the Solaris Operating Environment and WebCT provide the seamless always-on availability, performance and scalability required to support the growing number of online courses. For further information visit www.sun.com or at http://www.ualberta.ca