INDUSTRY

Sun Microsystems introduced the SunTone Service Delivery Specification, version 3.0, the newest version of Sun's widely-respected specification and certification program for the delivery and management of highly reliable, scalable, and secure IT services. Sun also announced that The Hershey Company has utilized and adopted the latest SunTone Service Excellence Model to achieve improved service delivery management and IT governance across its business critical systems. Running on the Solaris Operating System (OS) and a wide range of Sun Fire servers, Hershey has achieved 99.99 percent availability and other demanding performance metrics for its core transactional IT services under the SunTone Service Excellence Model. Sun Tone is part of Sun's integrated portfolio of aligned services that provide IT infrastructure planning, assessments, and resolution services for customer business issues. SunTone helps enterprises derive greater business value from IT, transforming IT from a support function to a provider of business-led services that create competitive advantage. SunTone Service Excellence Model provides guidance and a measurement system for Sun Tone users. The new SunTone Service Excellence Model 3.0 brings advancements in industry standard and regulatory compliance, major enhancements in security, greater manageability, and requirements for financial management. "The business of The Hershey Company is making the world's best chocolate and snacks. The business of our IT team is making world-class IT service available in order to keep production running smoothly," said George Davis, chief information officer, The Hershey Company. "This is our third year of certification. SunTone certification has helped assure high availability for our critical SAP ERP system on which Hershey -- as well as dozens of our external vendors, partners and customers -- rely." "The significant results achieved by Hershey are a testament to the benefits of building business-critical IT services to the SunTone standard -- surpassing SLA benchmarks, cost reductions, as well as attaining IT compliance in an increasingly stringent regulatory environment -- but it's just one of many examples," said Dan Berg, vice president and chief technology officer, Sun Services, at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Now with the latest release of the SunTone specification, Sun has made IT service delivery even more efficient, simple and complete for our customers." By adopting the SunTone Service Excellence Model and consistently operating enterprise data center services in accordance with SunTone certification requirements, Hershey was able to improve service availability and operational efficiency. Hershey was also able to reduce the time and effort required to meet requirements for IT governance. Hershey's experience is representative of a current global market trend to adopt IT service management (ITSM) principles to improve IT governance, compliance, drive operational efficiencies and derive greater business value from IT. The SunTone Service Excellence Model covers all the elements involved in delivering IT services -- system architecture, operational processes, and human skills. The SunTone Service Excellence Model embodies Sun's unique commitment to community participation and sharing. Developed through a participatory model, the SunTone Service Excellence Model is based on shared industry expertise and best practices. Hershey has been a long-term participant and contributor to the SunTone Council, a Sun-led industry group and elite sub-set of the SunTone community responsible for defining and updating the SunTone Service Delivery Specification. Sun helps customers deliver IT services based on the SunTone Service Excellence Model in three ways: - Customers can build their own IT service to the SunTone specification - Customers can outsource the delivery and management of their IT service to Service Providers offering SunTone certified services, such as AT&T Business in the U.S. and InterXion in Europe. InterXion has achieved SunTone certification for data centers services in 12 European countries and is the leading physical provider of carrier-neutral data center and managed services in Europe. - Customers can deploy their IT service on the Sun Grid Compute Utility For more on SunTone, please visit: its Web site.