Sun Microsystems says it has signed up 78 mid-market banks in the US to Kirchman Corporation's Bankway product in the last 90 days.
Since October, Sun says it has been gaining marketshare with mid-size financial institutions, who have taken advantage of entry-level prices of the Sun Fire V880s servers.
Recent wins include Pennsylvania-based Mars National Bank, Ohio's Security National Bank and Landrum Holding Company in Missouri. In addition, outsourcing firms Intrieve Corporation, eBank Systems, SBS Datacenter and Brasfield Data Services are moving a total of 72 banks to the Sun platform from proprietary systems.
Kirchman Corporation, a Sun iForce partner, recently sold its core banking solution to TowneBank, the largest FDIC-regulated bank in Virginia. The bank estimated savings of $500,000 in the first year of running the solution on Sun, and predicts $1 million per year by 2007.
Rachel Landrum, president of Kirchman Corporation, says Sun provides scalability, reliability and conserves customers' budgets.
"The clincher was Sun's acquisition of the Mainframe Transaction Processing [MTP] software, which was the solution we'd been using to rehost our mainframe applications and data to Unix," says Landrum.
Sun's mainframe rehosting solutions allow customers to run existing mainframe applications unmodified, in a contemporary computing environment. The vendor currently has over 950 MTP software installations worldwide, bringing 100 additional sites online since June 2002.