Sun Microsystems, embroiled in a savage pricing war and facing loss of market share to IBM and Dell, is reporting four IT contract wins with leading North American companies including Bank of America and RBC Financial Group.
RBC Financial Group has recently selected Sun - and Canadian eIntegrator S-Scape - to handle its global directory infrastructure project. Sun's iPlanet Global Directory, iPlanet Meta Directory and iPlanet IDAR (iPlanet Directory Solution Integration Edition), were deployed to manage the Canadian bank's directory entries for 58,000 employees, over ten million customers and 1.9 million online customers.
Bank of America chose the SunONE platform to run its new mortgage loan origination solution. The financial services powerhouse is using a number of Sun servers, including the Sun Fire 4500, 4800, 6500 and 6800 servers, all running the Solaris 8.0 Operating Environment and iPlanet Application Server 6.0. The mortgage system also includes the Sun StorEdge T3 arrays, Sun Cluster software 2.2, and Oracle 8i, OPS.
The new contracts - which also include deals with The Spiegel group and Bell Globemedia - provide some cheer for Sun which has watched its sales drop by over 50% in the last 12 months as recessionary forces have gripped former strongholds in the dot com and telecomms markets.
In second quarter results for fiscal 2002, ended 30 December 2001, and posted just today, Sun has reported a net loss of $99 million and 39% drop in revenues for the same period a year earlier. For the first six months of fiscal year 2002, Sun reported revenues of $5.969 billion, a decrease of 41% compared with the same period a year ago. Net loss for this period was $257 million and the net loss per share was $.08.