As part of this agreement, Sun Microsystems UK will be re-selling Tideway Foundation, alongside its Sun N1 software products to provide its customers with deep visibility into how their business applications map to the supporting infrastructure. This will allow Sun's customers to:

• Improve their IT governance capabilities by providing daily reports of key IT data, including a view of out-of-band changes that have occurred
• Stop unnecessary downtime caused by errant change by providing an accurate means to perform change impact analysis
• Improve the resiliency of their IT environments by identifying single points of failure, unpatched operating systems and misconfigurations
• Speed the identification of the root cause of IT incidents by providing an accurate map of system dependencies
• Allow the delivery of IT service to the business to be accurately charged for, on a per-application, per-line-of-business basis

Tideway Foundation already recognizes the Solaris 10 on x64 Operating System.

Tideway is part of the new Sun Grid Readiness Partner Offer, integrating with the Sun N1 products and technologies to provide service management for grid computing through virtualization, automation, provisioning and monitoring. The Sun Grid Readiness Offer is part of Sun's new Partner Advantage Program, which gives independent software vendors (ISVs) quick access to the resources needed to build solutions based on Sun technologies. The program allows ISVs to build innovative new Grid business models, drive sales opportunities, and deliver market leading solutions using Sun's Grid technology.

"It is exciting to work with ISVs such as Tideway Systems and provide them with the resources to build new Grid technology," said Jim Sangster, director, N1 Software Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "We believe that Tideway Foundation's ability to provide a trusted source of data center configuration information alongside the Sun N1 software portfolio provides an efficient solution for our customers."

"Tideway will be working more closely with Sun to in order to meet the needs of our joint customers," explained Richard Muirhead, CEO of Tideway Systems. "The collaboration provides the ability for Tideway to extend its geographical coverage and enables us to accelerate our penetration of the key markets, including Financial Services, both as part of the larger Grid Computing Initiative and also for data center optimization."