Sun is now soliciting entries in its 2004 iForce Partner
Excellence Awards program, co-sponsored by CMP Media LLP, which honors
those iForce partners who have a record of excellence in providing
quality products, innovative solutions and superior customer service.
Partners and customers may submit entries online through February 27th,
2004.
Scott McNealy and Sun staff will discuss how Sun is transforming
innovation into customer value in the Sun Analyst Summit, available via
Webcast February 11.
The beta program for Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 1.5
(J2SE 1.5.) is now available with new Java programming
language updates. It also features new application monitoring and
management features along with many performance improvements.
Enrollment for the beta program is currently open.
With Eclipse's decision to become an independent, not-for-profit
corporation and break away from IBM, industry watchers are focused on
Sun's next move. This past fall, Eclipse invited Sun to join their
membership. Sun executives cautiously regarded the proposal and still
have made no decisions. They have, however, written an open letter
congratulating Eclipse's move toward independence.
MatrixOne is making its collaborative PLM solutions available for
delivery on the x86 system, including
the new AMD Opteron processor-based systems, of Sun's.
With MatrixOne's support for the Solaris 9 Operating System (x86
Platform Edition) (Solaris OS) and the Sun Java Enterprise
System, customers
will be able to leverage high performance, highly scalable low-cost
platforms for their PLM implementations.
Sun, MartixOne and Sogeti USA will launch a new Center of Excellence
(CoE) in Cincinnati, Ohio, focusing on Product Lifecycle Management
(PLM) solutions.
The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture chose two Sun Microsystems
products for its annual Good Design awards program: the 24-inch
Flat Panel Monitor and the Sun Fire Blade Server. Submissions to
the program are judged by a jury of design professionals on criteria of
the highest aesthetic in terms of innovative design, form, materials,
construction, concept, function and utility.
In an interview available on sun.com, Neil Knox, Sun's executive VP of
Volume System Products, called the convergence of computing and
networking a natural, inevitable process that was set in motion when
servers were first networked. He characterized the technological
progression as a natural one for Sun as a result of its long-term focus
on entire system solutions, which would be strengthened by the acquisition
of Nauticus Networks.
It was the tenth birthday of sun.com during the last week of January
2004. Started on a single-processor SPARCstation used to post a
single page of type, sun.com has grown to a federation of Web sites
served from four data centers that house two million pages and serve
more than one million visitors daily.
K. Venkatesh Prasad, Infotronics Project Leader at the Ford Scientific
Research Laboratory, envisions a future when it will be possible to
drive to work while, using Sun solutions from the car, being able to
check your day's calendar, activate your home security system, listen
to the latest MP3 tunes and receive a reminder to pick up milk -- all
while keeping your eyes on the road and hands on the steering wheel.
For a limited-time, purchase one of a select group of Sun Fire
servers and get the Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 (formerly
Sun ONE Web Server) for U.S. $399 per server, saving over 90
percent from the list price.
A 24-page report produced by KeyLabs for Sun measured and reported the
peak client connections for the Sun Java System Web Server and
Apache/Tomcat to determine the effect on Web server performance of
adding additional processors to the system and to determine the
response time and number of successful transactions of the Web server
under load.
Writers Kavya Muthanna and Marina Sum describe the procedures required
in effectively monitoring the Sun Java System Application Server
7.x's performance and availability in their article entitled,
"Monitoring Sun Java System Application Server 7.x." Gathering
statistical data is of utmost importance, and the authors examine two
main monitoring interfaces for collecting the data.
Calling the Sun Java Enterprise System a "framework for future
success," Sun Chief Technology Officer Hal Stern identified three key
points solidifying the system's future: 1) architecture 2) cost savings
and 3) exploration.
Sun continues getting better according to a SoftwareMag.com survey.
This year's Software 500 survey ranked Sun at number 14 with $4 billion
in software sales, moving from its number 15 spot in 2003. The
Software 500 survey bases its results on revenue earned from both
software license sales and services.
Economical and efficient, StarOffice 7 may be Sun's most formidable
competitor to Microsoft Office. With an HTML editor, Draw graphics
program, Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation
program and a database component accessed from within the other
components, this software can be characterized as a real contender.
Sun's commercial software products will soon have more offerings from
Project JXTA. Servers and desktop product lines are targeted for the
Project JXTA tools in order to increase their collaborative abilities. The
recent surge in downloads of the free Project JXTA code has encouraged Sun to
direct Project JXTA toward more commercial applications.
Registration is still open for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference which opens February 9, 2004, in San Diego. The event
features the ETech Conference, a Digital Democracy Teach-In and
more.
The Linux Asia Conference and Expo in New Delhi, India, will present
the latest technology developments in open source and Linux. Scheduled
speakers include Bhaskar Pramanik, CEO of Sun, India, and Danese
Cooper, Chief Open Source Evangelist, Sun.
A recent article by Logan Harbaugh at serverwatch.com provides a
complete evaluation of the Sun Fire V210 server. Noting that Sun's
servers have long had a reputation of being more expensive, but more
reliable, than Intel-based servers, the article sets out to put the
record straight.
New Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) (x86 Platform Edition)
RTU licenses and upgrade licenses are currently available for midrange
servers with a maximum CPU capacity of 8 CPUs. A new x86 part number is
included so that new x86 hardware with expanded CPU capacity can be
licensed.
Now available is a special release of the add-on software for the Sun
Fire 15K server and Sun Fire 12K server that supports System
Management Services (SMS) 1.4 software and the automatic fault event
notification feature.
Sun is discontinuing the internal disk board option for Sun
Enterprise 4500 through Sun Enterprise 6500 servers, though
support for the systems will continue until at least 2007.
Sun is offering new standard configuration and compute node
configurations at lower prices for the Sun Fire V60x Compute Grid
rack system. The 32 compute nodes in the new standard configuration, as
well as the two new compute node ATO options, have dual Xeon processor,
2 GB of memory, 1x36 GB internal disk and no front bezel.
A D.H. Brown Associates report on the Sun Fire V440 server outlines
the server's features, its price advantage and other details such as the
TPC benchmark.
A DVD-ROM drive x-option is available for the Netra 240 server.
Other factory-configurable options for the DVD-ROM, 73 GB 15Krpm disk
drive and DVD-RW drive are available for the Sun Customer Ready Systems
(CRS) program.
Two downloads are available for the Sun Fire B100x Blade server: A
Memory Diagnostic Utility and a limited-time, right-to-use license for
the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) (x86 Platform Edition)
that enables you to download and install at no additional cost Solaris
9 12/03 OS (x86 Platform Edition).
This section recaps the top articles of the past month, grouped by
topic, to provide a quick glance at the most important recent news from
Sun. The article numbers are hot links to the Web version of the
article, giving you a one-stop resource to the news.
Support for the open source Web browser Mozilla is increasing,
specifically from Sun, Oracle and IBM, according to an article on
newsfactor.com by Jason Lopez. The article points out that while many
consider Mozilla a technically superior browser to Microsoft Explorer,
distribution of Mozilla remains a challenge.
Nukes is an open source content management system (CMS) entirely based
on Java technology. Nukes is available on the JBoss application server.
One of the key functionalities in the Nukes on JBoss is the porting and
integration of PHP BB (the source.org forum) under a new Java platform
and JBoss architecture.
The Globus Toolkit is an open source software toolkit used for building
grids. It is being developed by the Globus Alliance and others.
Globus Toolkit 3.0 (GT3) is a stable release.
The white paper, "Securing Your Apache Web Server with a Thawte Digital
Certificate" covers how to test, purchase, install and use a Thawte
Digital Certificate on an Apache Web server. Best practices for set-up
are highlighted to help ensure efficient ongoing management of
encryption keys and digital certificates.
The second edition of Matt Weisfeld's book, "The Object-Oriented Thought
Process," is now in print. In it Weisfeld lays the foundation in
object-oriented concepts and then explains how various object
technologies are used.
"Jakarta Pitfalls: Time-Saving Solutions for Struts, Ant, JUnit, and
Cactus" documents the common programming mistakes that can occur when
working with Java technology Open Source tools. Authors Bill Dudney
and Jonathan Lehr describe some of the most common pitfalls in detail,
explain how developers have walked into the trap, and discuss the
common symptoms and consequences, providing refactored solutions for
each pitfall, complete with code.
Dave Taylor's latest book, "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts: 101 Scripts for
Linux, Mac OS X and UNIX Systems," (No Starch Press) gives Linux,
UNIX system, and Mac OS X power users 101 customizable shell scripts
they can use to solve common problems, personalize their computing
environment and soup-up Web and Internet productivity.
Howard Lewis Ship has written "Tapestry in Action" as an introduction
to Tapestry and a guide to the world of Tapestry development. It shows
you how you can create complex applications by combining HTML with the
framework's components, and connect them to small amounts of
application-specific logic. It illustrates the practical benefits of
Tapestry's built-in management of state and its clean separation of
presentation logic from business logic.
PointBase has released Version 4.8 of its PointBase Embedded and
PointBase Micro Java technology relational databases and PointBase
UniSync, its Java technology-based bi-directional data synchronization product.
The new versions respond to customer demands for increased performance,
improved data recovery and heightened database security.
Catalyst Systems will soon release Openmake 6.3, the newest
version of its application build management tool. Openmake 6.3 allows
developers to work within the IDE while at the same time enabling the
organization to standardize and maintain consistency across the entire
build process. Even better is that Openmake 6.3 does not require the
coding of any makefiles, XML scripts or build-specific Java
programming language classes.
Appligent Inc. has introduced APConductor, which enables all of its
other applications to be plugged into a complex workflow via an
XML-based SOAP messaging framework. The result is the ability to
perform PDF processing within a Web Services-based architecture.
Appligent's component plug-ins run on the Solaris Operating System
(Solaris OS), Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX and Mac OSX. APConductor can
be used in both .NET and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition
(J2EE) environments.
Intermec Technologies Corp. is introducing the CV60, an RFID-ready
rugged vehicle mount computer that is capable of integrating RFID with
both Bluetooth technology and a wireless base station. The solution
facilitates upgrades to RFID and does away with the need for an
external base station to communicate with wireless scanners. It also
allows for easier installation, reduces TCO over a project's lifetime
and gives vehicle operators a safer and less cluttered workspace. The
solution is compatible with several industry-standard development
tools, including Java technology.
Pegasystems Inc. is releasing PegaRULES Process Commander Version 4,
the latest version of its smart business process management (BPM)
software. The system is designed to offer both business rules and
business process management, including strong system integration,
localization and business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities. All
of these are capable of running in a distributed, heterogeneous
environment. PegaRULES Process Commander V4 runs on Windows,
Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), Linux, AIX and mainframe
platforms, and the Oracle, Microsoft SQL and IBM DB2 databases.
Several years ago, TMI signed a deal with Coexis as part of its push
into the equity brokerage business. Already largely based on Sun
equipment, TMI needed to convert Syn~ code to the Java programming
language. TMI believed the Java programming language would have a
long-term future. More recently, TMI continued its reliance on Sun by
upgrading its entire server infrastructure to Sun systems.
First State Bank, in Waynesboro, Mississippi, recently made the
decision to convert to a UNIX platform, to better offer its range of
personal and business account services including online and telephone
banking. Within months, Sun helped the company achieve its goals with a
complete and successful deployment.
A major regional bank has chosen Syntellect Inc.'s Vista technology to
power customer self-service solutions for its two call centers. The
bank is attempting to incorporate open standards technology as well as
take advantage of its current staff of Java technology developers.
Vista offers open, standards-based Java technology, as well as VoiceXML
technology.
Cable & Wireless Real Time Nostro solution is a way to share real-time
data in the currency community. The service is run on Sun Enterprise
class servers and enabled by an application from Gresham Computing.
Sun has a long-standing commitment to the field of
computational biology (CB), as evidenced in the 77-page 2003 technical white
paper summarized here. Sun's interests extend to bioinformatics,
biosimulation, macromolecular structure, clinical informatics and
chemoinformatics. The paper explains how Sun is employing its chip
multithreading design to overcome the anticipated problem created by
the disparity between CPU speeds and DRAM speeds.
For better or worse, the data center has become the focus of IT
operations within most companies. The prevailing rule of thumb as
demands increase for speed and service is more -- more software, more
hardware, more interconnectedness -- until some data centers are
overprovisioned by as much as 100 percent against rare instances of
demand. The white paper recommends the N1 Service Provisioning
System as a solution to this problem in the bioinformatics lab.
Steve Henry and Liza Vertinsky have written a cautionary article
entitled "The Hidden Costs of `Free' Software," that warns CIOs in the
life sciences against hasty adoption of open source software (OSS). The very nature of the OSS model, Henry and Vertinsky assert, lends
itself to a number of issues that have the potential to result in
litigation.
In response to the rapid growth in the home care industry, Medixine has
added a new product to its eCare portfolio, Medixine My Results. This
new software integrates home diagnostics into a single software
solution, enabling patients to forward home diagnostics results from
devices currently available to the Medixine database.
The speech recognition software supplier, Nuance, is introducing the
latest version of its speech recognition engine, Nuance 8.5. The
company is also releasing its latest voice authentication software,
Nuance Verifier 3.5, which includes new features that increase
performance in an array of communications environments, including
wireless, hands-free and landline phones.
AppShield 4.5, an application security firewall, is currently available
from Sanctum Inc. The solution provides bulletproof defense for large
application deployments by dealing with critical operational
requirements and role-based administration and distributed management
capabilities. This helps to insure security best practices throughout
the organization.
The data visualization software developer, Tecplot Inc. is releasing
the Tecplot RS (Reservoir Simulation) Version 4.0. The integrated
plotting environment is designed for oil reservoir modeling and came as
the result of a collaboration between ChevronTexaco and Tecplot. The
solution allows data from different sources to be loaded and displayed
in plots. Data from multiple simulators and observed data -- such as
production rates and formation rates -- can be easily managed. Tecplot
is available on Windows or UNIX systems.
BrightQ is a printing solution designed by Codehost Inc. and released
by Ricoh Corp. The solution aims to provide IT system
administrators and printer support personnel with an easy-to-use,
graphically rich X Window System and UNIX Shell-based printing
environment. The solution is developed to give users of UNIX and Linux
operating systems the ability to access all of the finishing features
of the Ricoh Aficio and other support Ricoh devices. BrightQ is
supported by a variety of systems, including the Solaris Operating
System (Solaris OS) (x86 Platform Edition and SPARC Platform
Edition).
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