At the National Retail Federation Conference, Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of two new solutions designed specifically for retailers -- the Sun Retail Store Processor and Sun Retail Integration Architecture software. To thrive in today's competitive retail environment, retailers must provide a compelling experience that attracts and keeps profitable customers. The leading edge of this effort is in the store, and retailers today are using networked computing solutions to project a consistent brand experience to all customer touchpoints. The increasing reliance on information technology to drive fresh content and collect feedback on merchandising effectiveness is compounded by the scale of today's retail chain. With the Sun Retail Store Processor, Sun is helping retailers to deliver a superior customer experience. Based on Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) industry standard servers powered by the AMD Opteron processor, and Sun's N1 software, the Sun Retail Store Processor preserves retailer investment by delivering support for multiple operating systems, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), as well as standard Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows. With the power of Sun N1 Service Provisioning System software and Sun N1 System Manager software, the Sun Retail Store Processor helps enable retailers to rapidly rollout new capabilities to many stores across a retail chain with reduced human intervention and fewer errors. As a result, retailers can maintain a competitive edge while minimizing the cost to own and operate store systems. "Today's retail environment is an integrated network of customer touchpoints across a widely distributed network of stores," said Larry Singer, senior vice president and strategic insight officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "With the Sun Retail Store Processor, we're providing retailers with the agility to please customers and stay ahead of the competition at reduced cost using Sun Fire x64 standards-based servers." Sun also introduced the Sun Retail Integration Architecture, a design approach and recommended implementation for the development and deployment of retail applications. Aimed to help customers create a standards-based application platform from the supply chain to the store and web site, this solution provides a core set of services that is secure, simple and based on open standards. Sun Retail Integration Architecture software is based on Sun's Java Enterprise System and Sun Java Integration Suite, which provide support for most open, widely adopted programming interfaces and are a complete foundation for the development of Service Oriented Architectures and composite applications. This solution helps reduce operating costs as the suites are designed to work together, eliminating the typical integration problems seen with application platforms. Additionally, retailers get the added benefit of protecting their existing IT investments while rolling out new capabilities. "Most retailers have a fragile collection of disparate systems that makes it difficult to roll out new capabilities," continued Singer. "With the Sun Retail Integration Architecture, we're providing a roadmap, platform and tools that will allow retailers to add new features while preserving their investment in existing applications. More importantly, we're helping to remove the complexity by designing, testing and releasing the components together so retailers can focus operating resources on the customer." Sun will be demonstrating solutions based on the Sun Retail Integration Architecture software and the Sun Retail Store Processor at the National Retail Federation Conference, January 15-18 in New York City. For more information visit its Web site.