ACADEMIA

SAN FRANCISCO -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW) and Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCL) today announced an expansion of their 20-year strategic alliance to include support for Oracle products on Sun's full line of Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86 and Linux systems. Sun and Oracle have established the standard for enterprise computing over the last two decades. Today's announcements send the strongest possible signal that Sun and Oracle will together make low-cost computing platforms ready for prime time in the enterprise," said Mark Tolliver, executive vice president of marketing and strategy for Sun. "Lowest acquisition cost will be just one dimension of what we deliver. Together we're going to bring a new level of simplicity and manageability that significantly reduces the total cost of ownership for customers. Sun is the best platform for Oracle and we are now poised to extend that leadership to systems running Solaris x86 and unbreakable Linux." "Oracle and Sun have long partnered to bring customers highly reliable enterprise class systems," said Mark Jarvis, chief marketing officer, Oracle Corp. "Our joint vision for low-cost computing allows customers to take advantage of the enterprise software they need to grow their businesses successfully, without the traditional cost associated with high-end servers." In expanding the scope of their alliance, the companies announced today that: -- Oracle software will run on the #1 UNIX(r), Solaris SPARC; Solaris x86; and Linux on x86 -- bringing enterprise reliability and scalability to low-cost servers running mission critical applications and broadening customer choice in server environments. This includes certification for Oracle9i Database, Oracle9i Database with Real Application Clusters, Oracle9i Application Server, Oracle Collaboration Suite and the Oracle E-Business Suite. An increased focus on Oracle9i Database with Real Application Clusters on Sun furthers the drive to highly available, low-cost Oracle on Sun database clusters as an option in the datacenter. -- Sun will continue to deliver systems at industry-leading price points for branded Linux distributions. -- Sun and Oracle intend to roll out a global consolidation program in the upcoming fiscal year that will highlight how their joint platforms provide leadership in availability, utilization and manageability. This program is expected to build on today's announcements by defining reference architectures across all joint platform offerings and will leverage Sun's iForce(TM) Centers and Oracle Technology Centers worldwide to develop proof-of-concepts and reduce customer risk. -- Sun and Oracle will work together to enable automated deployment of Oracle and its resources in an N1-enabled data center. N1 aggregates heterogeneous computing resources and automates the complexity associated with managing technology. The integration of N1 and Oracle is expected to provide the capability to provision the Oracle database environment, while replacing failed hardware components on the fly, enabling a flexible database deployment. The companies also intend to incorporate Oracle database as the data store for Sun's N1, and work together to make N1 leverage the advantages of Oracle database technology. -- Sun and Oracle will bring low-cost computing to collaboration through Oracle Collaboration Suite and Sun's StarOffice(TM) software. With an integrated approach that simplifies communications and content, Oracle Collaboration Suite running on the Solaris platform is a more reliable, secure and cost-effective choice to the current fragmented server solutions. On the desktop, Sun's StarOffice software offers a full-featured, multi-platform office suite that offers a cost effective multi-platform alternative to closed office suites. -- The companies will run an "Oracle Makes Sun Unbreakable" joint marketing program touting the highly available and reliable combination of Oracle products on Sun servers. -- Sun and Oracle plan to simplify access to technology and support for developers by sharing information and services across the Sun Developer Connection ( http://www.sun.com/developers/ ) and Oracle's developer portal, the Oracle Technology Network ( http://otn.oracle.com/ ), creating a common community for more than 5 million developers. Oracle and Sun have worked together for 20 years to deliver the ultimate in secure, reliable and scalable enterprise-class datacenters to over 70,000 customers around the world. With a shared commitment to open, standards-based computing, Oracle and Sun deliver optimal performance, innovation and value to the customer through joint engineering efforts, sales and service. With this announcement, Sun and Oracle plan to bring the same performance to low-cost, commodity-based computing by introducing standards-based clustered servers as a choice for building data centers.