Sun Microsystems has unveiled a raft of initiatives for financial services companies as it bids to reverse its declining influence on Wall Street and address the threat posed by lower-cost servers and the burgeoning open source movement.
Joined by 100 of its top financial services customers at an event in New York City, Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz said he was returning the firm to its roots.
"Wall Street is one of the most demanding technology environments on earth, setting the gold standard for companies in every other industry. Seemingly low-cost, under-supported solutions peddled by so-called discount vendors won't cut the mustard," he said, in a deliberate swipe at competitors such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
At the event, Sun expanded its Sun StorEdge systems family of products, previewed new features for its Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), unveiled low-cost Solaris systems powered by Sparc and AMD Opteron processors, and introduced a new pay-for-use computing offer. The technology blitz was backed up by range of promotional incentives, including cash credits for Xeon trade-ins, free trial and support programmes, and discounts for Linux to Sun upgrades.
The vendor also took the opportunity to announce significant new customer and partner wins, including a deal with the Tokyo Stock Exchange to rebuild its disparate information systems using Sun architecture as a common platform. With the development of the consolidated platform, the TSE expects to reduce spending on information systems by 20% in the next five years.
Expanded alliances with AT&T, Nortel Networks and SunGard Availability Services were also introduced in an effort to address Wall Street business continuity concerns.