SYSTEMS

Sun Microsystems today announced the promotion of Stuart Wells to executive vice president, Strategic Development and Sun Financing. Wells will be responsible for driving high-level business opportunities and directing Sun's recently unveiled Sun Grid utility offerings reporting directly to Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, and become a member of Sun's Executive Management Group. Since joining Sun in 1988, Wells has served in a number of important management and executive positions. Most recently, as vice president of Wall Street Technologies, he helped Sun's influential financial services customers gain a competitive edge with Sun's products, services and solutions, and grew Sun's business with Wall Street financial customers. "Stuart's success taking back Wall Street speaks for itself. His dedication to delivering innovations like Grid Computing running on the Solaris 10 operating system (OS) to some of our most demanding customers has made him an ideal choice to lead our strategic development efforts," Schwartz said. "Stuart has deep relationships with the leaders of the world's financial services industry -- one of the primary targets for computing based on a true utility model, rather than simply consultants on demand. His leadership will be instrumental in helping our global customer base capture competitive advantage from the next wave of computing." Sun lit up the Grid in early February 2005 when it announced the ability for customers to access the computing power they need, when they need it, at an affordable price of $1/CPU-hour. Wells will be responsible for driving the adoption and evolution of the Sun Grid Compute Utility offerings, and work closely with Sun customers to help them reach their goals of increased business agility, reduced risk, and lower costs. His career with Sun is highlighted by contributions in the areas of desktop system software, graphics, imaging and multimedia products. Wells has held a number of key leadership roles including serving as senior vice president of the Market Development Organization where he led the development and marketing for the Sun market leading middleware products. He also served as senior director of Network Software Products in the Solaris software organization, where he oversaw the strategy and development of Sun's thin- client architecture. Before joining Sun, Wells held positions within Kaiser Electronics designing, architecting and implementing color 2D and 3D digital map system for earth flight. Prior to Kaiser, he was the lead researcher for a digital video conferencing and picture phone system for British Telecom. After 24 years in the industry, Wells holds five U.S. patents in multimedia, video, 3D graphics and imaging, and has numerous international publications. Wells was awarded his Ph.D. in Video and Image Compression, M.Sc. in Digital Techniques and B.Sc. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Wells was awarded an M.B.A. from Santa Clara University, California, and he attended Stanford University's Executive Business Program.