Archive | September, 2003

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that quarter-to-quarter (Q/Q), Sun outperformed the overall UNIX server market in both unit and vendor revenue growth, and maintained its position as the worldwide leader in both categories, according to the 2Q03 Worldwide Server Database by Gartner Dataquest released today. The company’s performance also resulted in growth in the overall OS category.

“This year we’ve taken steps to realign our product mix and deliver the integrated, open, low-cost solutions that customers are demanding,” said Larry Singer, Sun’s senior vice president, global market strategies. “This is paying off with a positive movement over the past six months. And with the new solutions we’ll announce at next week’s Sun Network conference in San Francisco, Sun will continue along the path of delivering innovative products that reduce customer cost and complexity.”

Other specific performance metrics for Sun include:

• Quarter-to-quarter (Q/Q), Sun outperformed the overall UNIX server market in both units shipped and revenues.
• In both the EMEA and APAC geographies, Sun equaled the highest Q/Q UNIX server revenue market share gains.
• In the high-end ($500K and over) UNIX server space, Sun outperformed both HP and IBM on a Q/Q revenue basis.
• Sun maintained its our number one position in both shipments and revenue in the $25K to $100K All OS category

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, The Network is the Computer, Solaris and Sun Fire are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd.

All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Today at OracleWorld, Scott McNealy, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems, laid the foundation for the next evolution of the Oracle and Sun relationship. The two companies continue their collaboration to drive cost and complexity out of the data center.

McNealy said that the two companies’ complementary strategies in key areas including enterprise grid computing, security high-availability and clustering are already having a positive impact on the industry.

“Oracle and Sun’s efforts to reduce the cost and complexity in the network is bringing results big-time,” McNealy said. “The alignment of both companies helps produce what customers need to work better and smarter on a leaner budget: open and comprehensive systems; unbreakable security; reduced complexity and increased efficiencies in building, running and evolving the data center.”

McNealy said the companies are teaming to help evolve grid computing from simply scientific research to a real commercial enterprise deployment. The Oracle(R) Database10g is the first database technologies to take advantage of the new data center environment that Sun is building with N1. The companies plan to increase overall system performance by utilizing new functionality in Oracle Database.

He offered tangible evidence of the success of the Oracle-Sun relationship.

• Oracle products are supported across three Sun platforms – Solaris SPARC, Linux and Solaris x86.
• The entire Oracle stack will be supported on Solaris x86. Oracle Database 10g will be the first to be ported.
• The two companies are linking developer programs, building one of the largest community of developers.
• Oracle continues to be Sun’s database vendor of choice for key applications.

The leader in open network computing solutions, Sun has gained market share and customer investment by delivering bottom-line value, security, choice and innovation in its network computing systems. Sun is the number one UNIX(r) platform for Oracle and 54 percent of Oracle Database customers use the Sun platform.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, N1, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.

Sun Microsystems today announced that Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Bill Joy, is leaving Sun. Joy joined Sun Microsystems in 1982, the year of its inception. Most recently he has served as the company’s chief scientist. Joy’s responsibilities will transition to Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer and executive vice president, Sun Microsystems.

“Bill will continue to be an inspiration to all innovators,” said Scott McNealy, chairman, president and chief executive officer, Sun Microsystems. “Bill’s many contributions, including those to Java technology, SPARC® and Solaris Operating System, have helped define Sun as one of the most innovative and inspired places on the planet. We thank Bill for the strong legacy of innovation that he leaves in the hearts and souls of every Sun employee. He leaves behind an incredibly strong team of innovators.”

“I am very proud of my accomplishments and the strong team we have built over the last two decades. I wish all those who continue at Sun great success in carrying on those things I have helped start, as well as all their other and future endeavors,” said Joy. “For 21 years, I’ve enjoyed the opportunities for innovation provided to me at Sun, but I have decided the time is now right for me to move on to different challenges.”

Innovation will continue at Sun through the work by Papadopoulos’ team, 12 Sun Fellows, including James Gosling, the designer of Java technology, more than 80 distinguished engineers, Sun Labs and the many communities that Sun works with including the GNOME, Java Community Process (JCP) program and OpenOffice.org.

This press release contains forward looking statements regarding future results and opportunities of Sun Microsystems, Inc., including a statement that innovation will continue at Sun through the work of Papadopoulos’ team. Factors that might cause actual results to differ include risks associated with attracting and retaining key employees, developing and marketing and acceptance of new products and services, cancellation or delay of projects, initiatives, products and services and continued adverse macroeconomic conditions in the US and internationally. These and other risks are detailed from time to time in Sun’s periodic reports that are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Sun’s annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2002 and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarters ended September 29, 2002, December 29, 2002 and March 30, 2003.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, Java Community Process, JCP, Solaris and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Support for Oracle® Database 10g on Multiple Sun Platforms – Coupled with Sun’s N1 Technology – Offers Simplicity, Affordability and Enterprise Quality for the Next Generation Data Center

Building on a 21-year history of value, choice and innovation, Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced today it will offer Oracle Database 10g customers multiple UNIX® -based platforms – including its market-leading systems based on the Solaris Operating System (OS) and UltraSPARC® processor; Linux-based systems; and, for the first time, Solaris x86-based systems – to help businesses reduce cost and lay the foundation for the data center of the future. Sun also announced continuation of joint development of N1 technology integration with Oracle, attacking cost and complexity at both the infrastructure and application levels to help customers derive maximum value from their computing environments.

For Oracle, enterprise grid computing is all about computing as a utility – it’s all about virtualization and provisioning,” said Benny Souder, vice president Distributed Database Development at Oracle. “N1’s notion of providing dynamic, scalable computing is exactly in line with what we want to do. N1 is very strategic to Sun and is definitely the direction Oracle is going. With the joint integration work we’re planning, this is how we’ll add value for our customers.”

Today’s announcement follows a watershed moment for the Sun-Oracle alliance set May 19 in San Francisco when Scott McNealy, Sun’s Chairman, President, and CEO, and Larry Ellison, Oracle’s Chairman and CEO, reaffirmed their commitment to attack cost and complexity and extend choice, value and enterprise-level features in the low-cost computing space. Sun’s support for Oracle Database 10g on multiple platforms, coupled with its N1 vision and utility computing model, offers customers a new method for matching IT resources to business needs, simplifying the deployment and management of complex computing resources and addressing the many problems that have hampered organizations in delivering true just-in-time computing.

“For Sun, the key message here is all about delivering a high performance infrastructure with choice, enterprise quality and low-cost components, to create a highly secure and affordable computing infrastructure for the next-generation data center,” said Stuart Wells, senior vice president, market development, Sun Microsystems. “The beauty of the N1 handshake is, customers can combine the unique Grid features of 10g, and with simplified management, harness the power of clustered, industry-standard servers across the entire data center, to deliver power and value from the network infrastructure like never before.”

Oracle Database 10g will run on the #1 selling UNIX-based Solaris-SPARC systems, as well as Solaris x86 systems and Linux systems – bringing choice, enterprise reliability and scalability to every point in the data center. Furthermore, Sun also offers the N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition, which is the industry’s first blade virtualization solution. As a component of the management environment for the Sun Fire[tm] Blade Platform, it enables users to rapidly design, configure, provision, and scale, blade-based server farms automatically.

Linking Technology Reliability to Profitability

A shared priority for both companies is to help customers find a direct link between technology solutions and profitability through maximum system uptime. To help customers stay focused on their business – and not their data center – Sun systematically addresses interoperability and performance variations with the “Solaris Train” quality assurance test conducted every quarter running Oracle database solutions on 32- and 64-bit, RAC and single node systems. The Solaris quality assurance process is top priority to ensure continued reliability, security and scalability of the Solaris OS. This, and other quality assurance benefits are available to customers through Sun and Oracle’s 21-year unbreakable commitment to help ensure rapid deployment, less complexity, improved price/performance, and 24×7 joint service and support for customers.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Java, Java Community Process, JCP, Solaris and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.