The agreement includes the purchase of licensing subscriptions, services and support for the Sun Java Enterprise System (Java ES), growing the total number of subscribers to significantly over one million and continuing Sun's momentum in financial services. Additionally, American Express plans to use the Solaris Operating System (OS) as a platform supporting this new integrated software environment.

"We found an excellent value proposition in the Java Enterprise System as it will help us to consolidate our licensing costs, reduce integration costs, and improve both functionality and flexibility of our distributed applications, identity management and web services," said Phil Steitz, chief technology officer, American Express.

"A complete, open-sourced enterprise-class software portfolio, with multi-platform support and priced at or below Linux or Windows is proving to be a very compelling value proposition," said John Loiacono, executive vice president of Software, Sun Microsystems. "American Express joins the long list of recent wins on Wall Street and once again validates that tight integration, a simplified business model and low, predictable pricing wins the day."

American Express plans to utilize the full-featured Java ES system to support a number of projects, including portal applications, and enhanced identity management services. The Java ES system is the software companies use to build their web based applications, help maintain the identities of people who access their services and enable them to quickly and securely develop and deploy applications and services.