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Information and data management have become mission critical to the success of any business. Leading analyst firms, such as Ovum, have agreed with the rise in the amount and importance of information, which according to a University of California study has reached an estimated twenty-four exabytes worldwide, businesses are faced with the daunting task of controlling content and its complexity. In response to this need Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the iForce(SM) Content Network, a new partner-based initiative designed to bring together resources from Sun and an extensive community of partners to help customers manage content complexity in the enterprise. Content complexity is the major challenge facing businesses today. It is imperative that companies get a handle on the vast array of data that exists throughout the dispersed enterprise, from Global 2000 companies to small and medium enterprises," said Shahram Moradpour, senior director, Market Development Organization, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The iForce Content Network brings together resources to help our customers manage this content complexity and streamline business processes, illustrating again why Sun is the network computing platform of choice for customers and vendors alike." The iForce Content Network, with more than 30 premier partner members, provides revenue generating opportunities which include demand-generation programs and support from a growing number of community members such as Agari Mediaware, Inc., Artesia Technologies, Autonomy, ContextMedia, Day Software, Inc., Documentum, Engage Inc., FatWire Software, FileNet, GAUSS Interprise, Interwoven, Intraspect, Open Text, Pinnacor, Pixion, RealNetworks, Stellent, Streamserve, ThoughtWeb, Inc., Verity, Vignette, Xerox, and others. All participating partners can enjoy a strong portfolio of benefits offered through Sun's iForce Initiative, including iForce Solution Centers, iForce go-to-market programs, and early access to Sun's leading edge technologies, allowing for a faster roll out of content management solutions to their customers. The Content Network is designed to provide partners and customers with the resources to build, deploy and market enterprise content management solutions for financial services, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, government and other key industries. "The Documentum enterprise content management solution running on the Sun platform has dramatically increased the level of control we have over the huge amount of content in our business," says Nadine Siddell, business analyst, at Applied Micro Circuits Corp. "As a result of deploying Documentum at AMCC, we have dramatically reduced the time it takes to search for information we need to make timely and efficient decisions. This has led to significant cost savings across our company." "Documentum and Sun are working closely together to deliver scalable, enterprise content management solutions for a range of industries, including financial services, government, high tech manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals," said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and chief strategy officer for Documentum. "Sun's iForce Content Network provides us with the resources and expertise we need to effectively deliver a broad range of content-based solutions for our customers." The iForce Content Network is designed to enable Sun's partners to develop on the Sun ONE platform, which includes the Sun ONE Portal Server, Sun ONE Application Server, Sun ONE Directory Server, and the Sun ONE Identity Server. "My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition brings an unmatched breadth and depth of business critical content to the corporate portal. By integrating My Yahoo! Enterprise Edition with the Sun ONE Portal Server, we're able to deliver dynamic and personalized content services to customers," said Tom Hochstatter, director Yahoo! Enterprise Solutions. "With over 2,700 global content sources, we are providing timely information that helps increase worker productivity and drives the adoption and 'stickiness' of corporate portals." Customers are clear on the value of Sun based solutions to manage their complex content environments. T-Systems International GmbH, Europe's second-largest integrated systems provider and a division of Deutsche Telekom, enables 3,500 users across different locations to share and manage information by running Xerox DocuShare, a Web-based document and content management application, on two Solaris systems. According to Timo Zeuch, application project manager for T-Systems' e-Business Solutions, "We elected to run DocuShare on the Solaris OS because the platform is not only powerful and robust, but allows us a high degree of control in configuring the OS. The combination of DocuShare and Solaris OS is very reliable and easy to administer, which will help us greatly as we expand its use across new geographical locations in 2003." Solutions, such as Xerox DocuShare with the Sun ONE platform, enable Xerox to design and deploy cost-effective document management solutions across enterprises of any size. "DocuShare has a unique capability to scale from a workgroup level up to thousands of users, and when running on the Sun ONE platform, leverages the scalability and reliability of the Solaris Operating Environment to serve these larger applications," said David Smith, vice president and general manager, DocuShare business unit. "The iForce Content Network is the type of resource we can use to help our customers design and deploy document management across a full range of organizations." Sun and FileNet have been providing joint customers in many industries with leading-edge content and process management solutions for nearly a decade. Designed and implemented by Bearing Point using Sun products and FileNet ECM software, the award-winning web-based New York City Department of Finance Automated City Register Information System (ACRIS) offers a prime example in local government. "There's a big push for local governments to streamline their business processes and records management, and provide public access and self-service. New York City's Department of Finance not only had a vision for eGovernment, but they made the investment to make it a reality," says Michael Harris, Senior VP of Products and Strategy, FileNet. "The major challenge our customers face when addressing complex content environments is the problem of integration. Sun ONE provides us with a framework to evaluate the customer's needs, and then design scalable architecture that integrates a portal with content management to significantly enhance customer value," said Michael Giske, CEO of MG Solutions LLC, a leading Sun ONE integrator. "When combined, Vignette's content management and portal suites and the Sun ONE platform offer our joint customers a powerful solution on which to build their businesses," said Leif Pedersen, vice president of product marketing at Vignette. "The combined products have all the elements required by an organization when deploying an industry leading portal and content management solution. The iForce Content Network provides us with the right combination of programs and resources to make our joint customers successful." "Sun understands the critical need for content and content services across and between enterprises, and that the growth and complexity of content requires a combination of integrated applications and infrastructure technologies," said analyst Frank Gilbane, editor of the Gilbane Report, "The Sun ONE Platform provides an architecture that can integrate Sun technology with the wide variety of solutions from Sun's extensive partner network into a strategic infrastructure, which is the only way to simplify the management of information in the enterprise." Tulane University is another customer benefiting from the Xerox and Sun relationship, and has streamlined its business processes by running DocuShare throughout the university, with the largest implementation on a Solaris server. This server is a central point for faculty collaboration within Tulane and with other institutions. Other uses of DocuShare include digitally managing vendor contracts, accounts payable invoicing and medical research archiving, allowing them to cut maintenance, storage and archiving costs. "DocuShare underlies a variety of our imaging and collaboration applications --- we integrate it with software and hardware products, and have found it to be virtually unbreakable on Solaris," said Mike Britt, director of document and visual communications at Tulane University. The iForce Content Network is currently available at http://www.sun.com/contentnetwork .