SANTA CLARA, CA -- Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announces a series of programs called, ``Project Blue-Away,'' aimed at targeted customers and existing IBM customers to replace IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) with Sun solutions. The first program within Project Blue-Away is a competitive replacement program for NUMA-Q, that offers neglected NUMA-Q users an alternative to IBM's end-of-life server architecture. Leveraging the Sun and Oracle best-of-breed relationship, the new competitive replacement program for NUMA-Q is designed to support the seamless migration of NUMA-Q solutions to Sun's Solaris(TM) Operating Environment on Sun servers. Offering customers porting ease, improved service response times, higher levels of reliability and scalability than NUMA-Q servers, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO), Project Blue-Away's replacement program for NUMA-Q has already helped a number of xSeries users move their mission-critical applications to Sun's Solaris Operating Environment-based UNIX® platform, including Littlewoods, Rural Payments Agency and Virgin Atlantic Airways. Sun's industry-leading Solaris Operating Environment (SPARC® Platform Edition), migration services and financial solutions offer xSeries users a more powerful and TCO-focused replacement alternative for the end-of-lifed NUMA-Q platform. ``When IBM announced the end-of-life of the NUMA-Q platform, we chose to migrate to the Sun platform because we believed that Sun provided the best long-term strategic alternative for our business critical production systems,'' said Neil Perry, IT systems operations manager of Virgin Atlantic Airways. ``The Sun and Oracle best-of-breed relationship guarantees us the scalability we need to grow our business critical Oracle Production environment for years to come in a stable and reliable environment.'' ``Sun brought together the perfect mix of products, processes, and people to help us migrate cost effectively from IBM's NUMA-Q servers to the Sun Solaris Operating Environment (SPARC Platform Edition),'' said David Hallett, Group IT Director, Littlewoods. ``As a result of the migration, we have been able to save approximately $1.5 million a year through lower TCO. And our new infrastructure provides the high availability, performance, flexibility and sustainability we need to move confidently into the future.'' ``Sun has always been a key hardware partner, and the close integration of our products provides the reliability and scalability necessary for customers who are migrating from IBM's xSeries,'' said Doug Kennedy, vice president, Global Platform Partnerships at Oracle. ``Both Oracle and Sun are dedicated to simplifying customers' NUMA-Q migration efforts, helping keep service levels up and service costs down.'' ``The end-of-life of the xSeries NUMA-Q product line, only two years after IBM acquired Sequent, shows the company's continued lack of commitment to its customers' evolving needs,'' said Shahin Khan, vice president and chief competitive officer at Sun Microsystems. ``According to industry analysts, this represents a $750 million market opportunity for Sun. Together, Sun and Oracle are delivering abandoned customers with best-of-breed solutions, an IT infrastructure that can grow with their business needs and an application lifecycle that can lower their total cost of ownership, while ensuring their investments are protected well into the future.'' For more information visit www.sun.com