GOVERNMENT

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Building upon Sun and Oracle's commitment to offer customers more choices, open standards and a wide range of applications, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) and Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL), the world's largest enterprise software company, today announced their intent to provide a new mainframe alternative offering. The offering is planned to provide customers with availability assurance, leading clustering technology, detailed implementation guides, proof of concept and migration services, and proactive joint support services. Based upon the high-end customer's unique business requirements, this offering is expected to deliver unprecedented levels of performance, reliability, scalability and support with one-stop-shopping. As a result, customers no longer need to be limited by a proprietary mainframe environment, the diminishing pool of IT resources and the lack of new applications. "Customers have become increasingly discontent with legacy applications and the cost and complexity of the mainframe," said Shahin Khan, vice president and chief competitive officer, Computer Systems at Sun Microsystems. "This approach from Sun and Oracle demonstrates the commitment of two industry leaders to provide customers with seamless best-of-breed solutions based on open standards. With this program, we expect to keep service levels up and costs down, and to deploy on a platform that best delivers the promise of the Sun ONE software architecture for services on demand." A typical mainframe customer is also looking for integrated functionality for business intelligence that reduces complexity and makes advanced data management safer, easier and more cost-efficient to deploy. Sun and Oracle offer a comprehensive solution for deriving accurate and timely business intelligence at performance and price points not easily attainable on a mainframe. "Large organizations need enterprise-class software and hardware that deliver extremely high levels of availability and scalability. Those who previously turned to the mainframe for such a solution now have a cost-effective alternative with Sun servers and Oracle9i Real Application Clusters," said Doug Kennedy, vice president System Platform Division, for Oracle Corporation. Ease of Implementation A key component of the mainframe alternative offering is an implementation guide detailing how to integrate the SunTone (TM) platforms, Cluster Platform 15K server and Oracle9i Real Application Clusters. The implementation guide outlines best practices based on Sun's and Oracle's rigorous testing standards and methodologies, which reduces interoperability issues for the customer. Customers can leverage the joint expertise of Sun and Oracle engineers, shortening the learning curve traditionally associated with new technologies, and decreasing customer's time-to-market and total cost of ownership. The SunTone Cluster platform 15K server is the industry's leading integrated cluster platform, which consists of two or more, factory integrated and rigorously tested Sun Fire(TM) 15K servers and Sun StorEdge(TM) 9900 arrays. Oracle9i Real Application Clusters manages large amounts of data and users, plus complex analysis typically found in a mainframe environment. The Oracle9i Database offers unlimited performance, scalability and security to ensure that high-end customers receive the best response time, enabling them to make quick, accurate business decisions in a secure environment. Proactive, joint support service centers give customers a single-point of contact and can help eliminate the need to open multiple service orders. The service centers can enable customers to seamlessly resolve an issue in a multi-vendor, mission-critical environment, and can help improve time to resolution, delivering the system availability requirements demanded by high-end customers. The Joint Escalation Centers (JEC), established in May 2000, have cut time to resolution in half. The JEC is comprised of co-located senior support engineers who support customers globally on a 24x7 basis. They use common support processes and tools to resolve customers' complex interoperability issues. By pooling support expertise and having singular management responsibilities, the JEC accelerates problem resolution and enhances system availability for Oracle and Sun joint customers. Sun and Oracle Customers Reaping The Benefits Katun Corporation, a leading aftermarket distributor of imaging supplies, photoreceptors and parts for the business equipment industry, has been able to modernize its existing IT infrastructure, which will strengthen the company's contact with its suppliers and customers, by choosing the right combination of Sun and Oracle products and services. "We are continually improving our service to more than 19,000 business equipment dealers and distributors in more than 170 countries. After recently choosing Oracle's database and ERP applications, we went through an RFP process to determine which would be the best platform to support the new applications. After considering IBM and HP, our decision was to go with Sun," said Diane Dumer, CIO at Katun. "Not only does the cost-competitive Sun platform offer scalability, availability and a leading market position, the alliance between Sun and Oracle offers excellent expertise and support. In addition, Katun selected Sun because most third-party applications are written and delivered first on the Solaris platform, giving Katun the option of deploying the newest technologies as soon as they are available." The joint offering is expected to be rolled out through a network of industry leading system integrators (SI), which provide an opportunity for customers to choose the SI that best meets their unique business requirements. Related implementation guides as scheduled to be available within the next 60 days. For more information visit www.sun.com or www.oracle.com