As enterprises prepare for the new year, many will be faced with the IT dilemmas of keeping pace with technology breakthroughs, responding to customer needs for the latest and greatest technology offerings and spending on new or improved IT infrastructures with tighter budgets. According to industry analysts: IT operations groups will see a significant increase in workload in 2003 with less budget and less staff a basic reality(1); short-cost reduction will be the first priority for many IT operations groups in 2003(1); IT operations groups will need to concentrate on point solutions that are narrow in scope while ensuring there is a process in place to engage application development in groups early in the design process(1) and high availability will be more relevant than ever before in 2003 during the continued downturn(2). Sun responds to these IT dilemmas by helping enterprise customers obtain the highest level of computing efficiency in the design, development and deployment of data centers. Given these issues and challenges, following are just three reasons why Sun's Customer Ready Systems program can help IT professionals face the challenges of doing more with less in the coming year: * One of the overlooked cost-cutting opportunities is the strategic decision to outsource integration and deployment of new servers, storage and software - a move that saves money, reduces risk, and frees up scarce internal talent to focus where they add maximum value to the company. Sun's Customer Ready Systems program has proved to reduce 90-95% in customer installation times. * As IT management purchases new servers and storage, they will need to track how effectively IT groups can get the systems up and running. Having a single point of contact to manage the integration of hardware and software for customized solutions can help enterprises get to market faster. Sun's Customer Ready Systems program helped the University of Hawaii save at least two calendar weeks and 200 person hours in the deployment of their IT infrastructure. * With high availability a top priority, more companies are expected to embrace the "flexible clustering" approach. Through Sun's Customer Ready Systems program, Sun delivers fully customized, configured, built-to-order server clusters that come with failover and redundancy capabilities to help ensure high availability. "Our customers are faced with many IT challenges, including turning their IT investments and operations into hard cost savings and greater return on investments", said Ravi Pendekanti, director of solutions marketing, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "With our Customer Ready Systems program, we are helping customers eliminate some of the guesswork and complexities associated with the design and implementation of data centers so that they can get to market faster. We factory-integrate Sun's end-to-end hardware and software offerings, and third party complementary technology to suit customized business needs. There's no question about it... Sun provides customer solutions that can help IT staff do more with less in 2003 and beyond." To get more information on Sun's Customer Ready Systems program and/or to speak with a Sun executive, please contact me at 415.972.0624 or liza.santos@sun.com. Customer references are also available upon request. (1) Gartner Research Notes 11/2002 - "Enterprise Management ROI and Cost Reduction in 2003 (2) IDC Bulletin 2002 - "High Availability: More Relevant Than Ever During the Downturn"