SAN FRANCISCO, SunNetwork(SM) 2002 Conference and Pavilion, The City of Oakland, home to a diverse population of 404,000 residents, announced today that it has migrated its financial applications and data to the Sun Microsystems platform. Choosing the Sun solution over other IT vendors such as IBM and Compaq, the migration to the Sun platform helped the City achieve its goals to rapidly improve accuracy and speed of payroll processing while reducing total cost of ownership for its payroll processing system. As a result, the City has cut its payroll processing time nearly in half and reduced the department's total cost of ownership by 30 percent. "In our benchmarking tests, the Sun solution demonstrated superior capabilities over other solutions from other major vendors," said Patrick Simon, chief technology officer and director of IT for the City of Oakland. "We are quite excited and proud of the teamwork that Sun has demonstrated with our IT staff, and we look forward to continuing this relationship as our vision for e-government in Oakland continues to unfold." The Sun platform currently processes up to 350 transactions per minute and supports 1,000 concurrent users while maintaining 99.5 percent availability. Just by speeding its payroll process, which helps minimize employee overtime, the City is saving approximately $115,000 annually in operating expenses. The City expects to achieve a full return on its investment in one year. Services from Sun were instrumental in developing the City's IT infrastructure. Sun consultants oversaw the architecture design and implementation build for the migration project, providing overarching program and project management direction based on industry standards. The solution design utilizes the Oracle Financials and Oracle database technology and is based on careful evaluation of the City's criteria and of the resources required to support the applications. As a result, the architecture leverages the benefits of the Sun Enterprise(TM)10000 server, Sun StorEdge(TM) arrays, software and tape libraries coupled with the Solaris(TM) 8 Operating Environment. As part of helping the City of Oakland to manage the solution following deployment, the Sun Services team helped develop, and is delivering, a customized training plan for the City's IT staff. In addition, as part of its efforts to sustain high availability and reliability, the City is engaging mission-critical support services from Sun, as well. "The close working relationship between the City of Oakland and our consultants helped us discover that they needed a more powerful, high performing solution that was better suited for their financial applications," said Jon Caputo, vice president of Sun Professional Services in the Americas. "As a result, we helped the City deploy a solution that provides greater flexibility, will scale with their growing and changing needs and will help the City continue reducing their IT total cost of ownership." The City of Oakland has future plans to extend its infrastructure to include the open, standards-based Sun(TM) Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) to help them efficiently deploy Java(TM) technology-enabled web services. The iForce(SM) Ready Center can also be utilized to help speed time to market for the City's future initiatives.