INDUSTRY

DENVER, CO -- J.D. Edwards & Company (Nasdaq: JDEC - news) and Sun Microsystems(TM) (Nasdaq: SUNW - news) today announced the opening of the J.D. Edwards-Sun Competency Center dedicated to testing collaborative supply chain applications and technologies that improve businesses time-to-market, smooth process transitions and lower total cost of ownership. Based in Denver, the facility provides a range of solution evaluation, configuration and capacity planning services. The Center will be used to qualify advanced technologies and platforms from the companies, providing customers additional investment protection. It will also serve as a ``test bed'' for system integrators to develop and test customized industry solutions. Companies can assess and validate that their unique business challenges can be addressed with J.D. Edwards' OneWorld® ERP, CRM and APS software, running on Sun servers, storage technology and Sun Cluster 3.0/SunPlex(TM), Sun's most powerful and comprehensive cluster solution. These jointly developed solutions are ideal for deployment in organizations and industries such as government, education, research, telecommunications, service providers, media, financial and manufacturing. The Competency Center offers a valuable service for companies looking for collaborative commerce (c-commerce) solution evaluation, capacity planning and scalability testing. ``This collaboration is a significant step forward in delivering optimized software/hardware solutions to our customers and to the market,'' said Mike Jackson, senior manager, OneWorld Platform Technologies, J.D. Edwards. ``We are giving customers peace of mind by helping them determine whether a solution will solve their business problems and to test configurations and scalability scenarios. We selected Sun's Sun Cluster 3.0/SunPlex environment because it provides continuous availability and horizontal scaling of our OneWorld application services.'' ``With solid technology, methodology and resource investments from both Sun and J.D. Edwards, the Competency Center offers substantial value to customers,'' said Greg Rucki, director of Global Alliances for Sun. ``Customers have the opportunity to prove the combined Sun J.D. Edwards open solutions provides a competitive advantage in managing their own custom real-world business needs, while limiting their technology risks and protecting their investments.'' Testing Environment The Sun Cluster 3.0/SunPlex environment combines new levels of availability and reliability to help enable continuous, 24x7 uptime -- with massive scalability, sophisticated manageability, advanced security and ease of use with the core delivery platform -- for the Solaris(TM) Operating Environment (OE). A key benefit of Sun Cluster 3.0/SunPlex is the System Level Management component, which allows applications to scale within a single domain -- one Solaris OE image -- or system, and allows applications to scale across multiple domains or systems. By adding more domains or systems to the cluster, availability, capacity, performance and throughput is increased and service levels are maintained in the event of an outage -- planned or unplanned. An environment to develop and demonstrate J.D. Edwards' collaborative-commerce e-solutions, the Center will leverage the following Sun technology: -- Sun Enterprise(TM) class servers; as the database server with 16 UltraSPARC-II processor and 16 gigabytes of memory -- Sun Fire(TM) 280R servers -- Solaris OE -- Sun StorEdge Arrays For more information visit www.sun.com or www.jdedwardsnews.com/