SYSTEMS

New Services Like Identity Management and Strategic Partnerships With Companies Such as EDS Allow Customers to Comprehensively 'Test Before They Invest' -- Sun Microsystems today announced the expanded Sun Solution Centers, more than 60 global sites that offer access to award-winning Sun products, services, solutions and partners to help customers mitigate risk and decrease time-to-market. The Sun Solution Centers include a variety of new offerings such as identity management solutions, services and competencies like best practices and competitive analysis, and partnerships with Solutions Integrators (SIs) including EDS. The comprehensive and unique centers allow customers to "test before they buy" in real-world environments to better plan and deploy new IT strategies. "The Sun Solution Center was an integral part in the decision of one of the world's leading technical institutes, Tokyo Institute of Technology's (Tokyo Tech), to create Japan's largest supercomputer on a foundation of Sun. The key differentiator was that the Sun Solution Center provided large scale expertise in a variety of areas including blueprints, architecture, scalability tests, benchmark and integration -- all from one engagement point," said Dan Miller, vice president, Sun Japan. "This allowed a simplified, streamlined approach to creating an easy-to-use high performance computing environment for Tokyo Tech students and researchers. As a result, Tokyo Tech will deploy the fastest supercomputer in Asia and rank within top five of the Top500 supercomputers by June 2006 while simultaneously cutting its total cost of ownership significantly." The Sun Solution Centers offer customers unprecedented resources to help them more effectively make purchasing and implementation decisions, and improve total cost of ownership. In one location, customers have access to award-winning Sun technologies like the Solaris 10 Operating System and Sun Fire servers, as well as core competencies such as competitive analysis and best practices to ensure Sun's innovations are deployed in the most efficient manner possible. In addition to the new services and solutions, the Sun Solution Centers also offer collaborative workshops, solution architectures, proof-of-concepts and prototyping, blueprints, system architectures, performance testing, and benchmarking, among other customer- oriented aids. Sun's partnerships with industry-leading Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and SIs like EDS further provide value by offering customers 360 degree views of their IT projects-from planning to testing to deploying. "We have had a strong partnership with Sun for over 20 years. During that time the Sun Solution Centers have become instrumental to our business by partnering with EDS to provide best-in-class solutions and technology expertise for our customers. Recently, we worked with a key client in the communications industry to migrate a high-volume Oracle-based data-mart application from a 12 processor Sun Fire E10K domain to a Sun Fire T2000 server. This project will lay the foundation for a tech refresh strategy focused on improving application performance while reducing space and power consumption," said Larry Lozon, vice president, EDS Data Center Services. "We look forward to this continued partnership and future Sun Solution Center engagements leveraging the Sun and EDS expertise combined to help our customers solve their problems and attain their business goals by mitigating risk and saving time and money." For more information about the Sun Solution Center, visit its Web site.