SYSTEMS

Hundreds of Global Customers Choose Sun over HP, IBM for Advanced IT Infrastructure and the Power of the Solaris OS: Sun Microsystems ended the first fiscal quarter of 2007 with significant customer momentum for its recently enhanced IT product portfolio and the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), including key wins with Alcatel, MasterCard, Research in Motion (RIM), the US Library of Congress, and Verizon Wireless. "This quarter Sun achieved double digit revenue growth year over year in each of our four geographies (US, International Americas, EMEA and APAC); evidence that our customers value our approach to open standards, innovation and investments in R&D," said Don Grantham, executive vice president, Global Sales and Services, Sun Microsystems. "Our portfolio of products and services is the strongest we've seen in years, improving our ability to address our customers' business and technical issues. The uptake in professional services offerings demonstrates how closer relationships with our customers can continue to drive revenue to Sun." Innovation Drives Customer Adoption Hundreds of customers, such as Alcatel, eBay, MasterCard, Research In Motion, the US Library of Congress and Verizon Wireless, turned to Sun for their IT Infrastructure needs, demonstrating strong market acceptance for its product line, driven by the Solaris 10 OS, newly launched Sun Fire servers, Sun StorageTek solutions and Sun Services. Alcatel selected Sun's Customer Ready Systems (CRS) to build a pre-validated, pre-integrated and pre-tested solution for High-Speed Link (HSL) Intelligent Network deployments with customers in Asia, Africa and Europe. The Sun solution, incorporating UltraSPARC-based Sun Fire servers, Sun storage and various third-party products running on the Solaris OS, offered better Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Alcatel selected Sun to further strengthen the reliability and robustness of its products. Alcatel also expects cost savings and will leverage Sun's well-known reliability in the telco sector. Research In Motion (RIM) recently selected a Sun StorageTek and Sun Services package to replace a mid-tier storage system in order to support the company's rapid growth. Central to RIM's choice was Sun's strong support and innovative configuration, which delivered more storage disk and cache at an attractive cost. The deal represents an expansion of Sun technology in use by the Waterloo, Ontario-based creator of BlackBerry(R). When the US Library of Congress (LoC) went seeking to create an IT infrastructure for its National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) preservation storage project, it selected a multi-tiered system solution comprised of Sun Fire x64 servers and Sun storage running the Solaris 10 OS, bid by federal partner GMRi. The LoC has opted for the Sun solution to house audio and video artifacts collected over the last 100 years, which are currently being digitized. In part due to the strength of Sun's long-term storage commitment and technology roadmap, the LoC has entrusted Sun technology to be the foundation of its multi-year, multiple Petabyte project to preserve an important portion of the National Treasure. While the tape-based storage system will offer online access to the massive archive and boasts the ability to manage an immense workload of data in large bursts, it is also architected for efficient disaster recovery. Additional benefits of Sun's tape solution are its comparative advantages on scalability, power consumption, space, cooling and cost. Continuing to improve the scalability, reliability, availability and security of a critical data mediation application, Verizon Wireless selected Sun systems comprised of the Solaris OS, UltraSPARC based Sun Fire servers and Sun Services. The capabilities of the Solaris OS and the price/performance of Sun servers allow Verizon Wireless to continue to grow this critical application. "We have been pleased with the scalability of the products from Sun and the support is great," said Thomas Lawson, Executive Director, Verizon Wireless NSS. Among the hundreds of other global customers that chose Sun in the first fiscal quarter of 2007 are Nanshan Science and Technology Bureau of China, Indonesian mobile telecom provider PT Telekomunikasi Selular (Telkomsel), international design company Diesel, Japanese telecom provider KDDI Corporation, US-based outsourced asset management company SEI, the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, international communications and IT company Harris Corporation, computer-generated imagery leader Rhythm & Hues, and SUN YAT-SEN University in China. More information on these customers can be found at: its Web site.