http://sun.systemnews.com Financial Services http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/126/1/Financial/20362 For the tenth consecutive year, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) has awarded the SWIFTReady Label in the category of Financial Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to Sun Microsystems for its Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). SWIFT has been raising the bar annually for EAI vendors, asking them to fully adopt the SWIFT standards in order to enable SWIFT participants to achieve better straight-through processing (STP) rates over the SWIFT network. The imposition of increasingly demanding standards makes this tenth consecutive award to Sun no small accomplishment. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/110/2/Financial/17933 Two recent surveys provide a barometer on the financial services sector and its IT spending. Grant Thornton’s 14th Annual Survey of Bank Executives indicates that 73 percent of bankers plan on increasing their technology spending in 2007. Gartner has gathered statistics that show the financial services industry accounted for $13.2 billion in server purchases in 2006, up 3.2 percent from the prior year. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/110/2/Financial/17935 Germany's Deutsche Apotheker und Ärztebank or apoBank is the country's largest cooperative bank with more than 300,000 customers and assets of 31 billion EUR (41 billion USD). apoBank serves individuals and organizations involved in social welfare occupations, including pharmacists, physicians, dentists and veterinary surgeons. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/107/2/Financial/17466 Gordon Smith, writing for siliconrepublic.com, reports on the new storage management system implemented by Irish Life & Permanent (IL&P) as a key component in the company's long-term backup and disaster recovery strategy. The system, implemented by Sun and including two Sun StorageTek Streamline SL8500 tape libraries and the Sun StorageTekSM Virtual Storage Manager system, will centralize the management of the financial provider’s backup operations, reduce its storage management costs and support the company’s disaster recovery plans. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/107/2/Financial/17467 Sun's collaboration with insurance industry executives has resulted in a number of solutions designed for that sector that include comprehensive data management, business intelligence, data warehousing, security and information lifecycle management solutions. Sun's vendor-neutral Open Systems architecture supports best-of-breed applications from its industry-leading partners to deliver a standards-based, growth-enabled infrastructure for ensured flexibility and longevity. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/107/2/Financial/17465 Legacy systems typically cannot support a variety of diverse business rules within a given application with the result that, for each new insurance product a company wishes to introduce, new servers need to be deployed. The tangle of systems and applications necessary to support all of a company's insurance products rapidly turns into a headache for all concerned. AdminServer on Sun is a viable alternative to doing business with an unnecessarily complex and costly IT infrastructure. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/102/2/Financial/16783 Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology will power a new solution for the Jordan Kuwait Bank (JKB) to be implemented by Specialized Technical Services (STS), an e-payment solutions provider in the Middle East. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/102/2/Financial/16804 Created by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1975, the Regulation National Market System (Reg NMS) is in the throes of changes designed to accommodate increased trading volumes and compliance requirements that involve improvements in the storage, archiving, retrieval and securing of data. Sun Microsystems addressed those issues in its appearance at the recent Securities Industry Association trade show. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/96/1/Financial/15879 Listen to Sun executives highlight the company's 2006 priorities, long-term strategy and vision by tuning in to on-demand replays of sessions held during the annual Sun Analyst Summit which took place January 31 - February 2 in San Francisco. Keynotes from Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy, President and COO Jonathan Schwartz and others are available. http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/96/1/Financial/15781 IDC company Financial Insights has released its annual report identifying the Top 10 IT initiatives that will have key strategic importance for banking organizations worldwide in 2006, and announced the availability of a U.S. banking IT spending guide that provides five-year spending forecasts with specific data related to banks' and credit unions' allocation of their IT dollars.