Business & Money Trail:

SUN TARGETS $1 BILLION MAINFRAME MARKET OPPORTUNITY

Building on its successful replacement program for IBM's abandoned NUMA-Q users, Sun Microsystems Inc's Project "Blue Away" is now targeting IBM's midrange capacity mainframe customers. The mid-market mainframe represents a potential $1 billion opportunity that Sun intends to lead with its Sun Fire Midframe server family.

"The benefits of a mainframe must be justified in terms of its costs," said Mike Kahn, Chairman of The Clipper Group Inc, technology acquisition consultants in Wellesley, MA. "Enterprises that use a smaller mainframe have higher operating costs per unit of processing, primarily because they pay more for operating software, than do enterprises with very large mainframes, or those that are running similar workloads on UNIX(R) servers. In many cases, Sun's mainframe migration program will offer them significant life-cycle cost savings."

Oracle Corp, a best-in-class Sun partner, offers leading enterprise business solutions that can help companies significantly improve the bottom line. The combination of the Sun Fire server family and Oracle applications and technology provide a strong alternative for the midrange market.

"In today's challenging economic environment, companies are taking a hard look at their bottom line and growth strategies," said Doug Kennedy, vice president, Platform Partnerships, Platform Technologies Division, Oracle Corporation. "Together, Oracle and Sun can provide these companies with a cost-effective, high-performance alternative to their mainframes running legacy applications that scales as their businesses grow."

Sun's Project "Blue Away" offers mainframe customers increased return on investment through:

• High availability, reliability and performance: The Sun Fire 3800-6800 Midframe servers are specifically designed to offer the availability and resource management capabilities of mainframe computing at a fraction of the cost. According to benchmark results, the Sun Fire Midframe Servers offer over four times the price performance advantage of an IBM Mainframe.
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Sun's mainframe rehosting software makes it easy to move mainframe software to open systems thus protecting legacy applications and skill sets. Furthermore, Sun's relationships with best-in-class ISVs such as Incert, Mercury Interactive, Mutek Solutions, OP40, Oracle, Peakstone, Precise, and Tidal Software enable Sun to deliver proactive and predictive workload management and application instrumentation -- key elements for Mainframe-style computing.
• Incentive: As part of the "Blue Away" initiative, customers can take advantage of Sun's Upgrade Allowance Program and receive 10 percent credit when they trade-in their Mainframe system towards the purchase of any Sun Fire Midframe or high-end system. Customers can also benefit from Sun's leasing solution that combines all the elements of the replacement program into a single, cost-effective payment plan.

"Last quarter, Sun shipped over four times more MIPS than IBM," said Shahin Khan, chief competitive officer, Sun Microsystems. "Since IBM is the only vendor of mainframes, they have been raising prices on captive mainframe customers and paying less attention to customers with small or mid-size mainframes. Through this 'Blue Away' initiative, Sun is offering a tried, tested and more cost-effective solution."

Reflecting its growing acceptance in the industry as a leader in mainframe rehosting, Sun was recently named by AFCOM, the leading association for data center professionals, as its Vendor of the Month for its Mainframe Rehosting solution. According to the AFCOM site: afcom.com, "Customers experience more than a 50 percent reduction in cost-of-ownership, in addition to a noticeable improvement in both online and batch performance, when they rehost mainframe applications on the Solaris Operating Environment." More information on Sun's Mainframe rehosting programs can be found on www.sun.com/datacenter/mainframe/rehosting.

About Sun Microsystems Inc

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems Inc 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 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at sun.com.